Karen the Small Press Librarian

Amazon and Literary Culture: A Discussion

2012-02-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

I'm excited that Atticus Books included me in a lively panel discussion on indie bookstores, bookselling culture, e-books, and literary culture in the age of Amazon.

"Is Amazon the Death of Literary Culture?"
Atticus Books blog
Six Degrees Left series
February 14, 2012
http://atticusbooksonline.com/sdl-amazon1

Panelists:
Author, small press blogger, ex-bookstore clerk Karen Lillis
Author Laura Ellen Scott (Death Wishing, Ig Publishing)
Poet & bookseller Angela Williams (Politics & Prose)

Moderator Lacey N. Dunham is the publicist for Atticus Books and a former bookseller.

I find myself still asking questions about Amazon after this discussion is over, even about its literal place in literary (publishing) culture. Is it a tool, is it a format, is it a middle man, is it a store, is it a mall, is it a yard sale, is it a billboard, is it a catalog, is it a database, is it a data aggregator, is it a software, is it a gadget, is it an app, is it a bookstore, is it a publisher, is it a predatory public company that sells whatever it thinks the public wants to buy and doesn't give a damn about books?

Feel free to weigh in via the comments section with your own thoughts.

Best of the Small Press 2011: Last Day

2012-01-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

Our last indie publishing recommendations for 2011 come from Marc Bell, who came to Pittsburgh in September when his Pure Pajamas (Drawn & Quarterly) tour joined up with the Big Questions tour of illustrator Anders Nilsen. Based in Ontario, Marc is both a cartoonist and a fine artist whose drawings have been compared to R. Crumb, Kaz, and Philip Guston. In the '90s he rose to underground fame with his self-published mini-comics (aka comic zines). Other readers might know him from the anthology Kramers Ergot or his own retrospective book, Hot Potatoe (Drawn & Quarterly, 2009).

Copacetic Comics hosted Marc & Anders' Pittsburgh event, as I mentioned on Day 8 of the Best of Small Press 2011. I've already crowed about (more-than-comics) indie bookstore Copacetic a few times on this blog, but I don't think I've mentioned PIX, the new Pittsburgh Indy Comics Expo that Copacetic owner, Bill Boichel launched in 2010. From the start, PIX drew an impressive array of small publishers and self-publishers from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, DC, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Columbus, Vermont, and numerous other spots in the Northeast and Midwest. In 2011, PIX coincided with SPF, Pittsburgh's literary small press fair.

Thanks again to Marc Bell for offering the final recommendations for Best of the Small Press 2011. Don't miss this long interview with him in The Comics Journal.

*****

1. Rapture, Scott McIntyre & Peter Thompson (self published)
2. Uncle Pork Chop Scrapes Away The Summer, Billy Bert Young, Jason McLean and Peter Thompson (self published)
3. Melatonin Carp Bomb, Mark Connery (self published)
4. One Dollar, Jonathan Petersen (self published)

Recommended by Marc Bell
Author of Pure Pajamas and Hot Potatoe
http://marcbelldept.blogspot.com/

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 11

2012-01-29T19:32:00.000-08:00

Today's small press recommendations come from writer Martha King. Martha has had a long history in the small press: She is the author of numerous books of both prose and poetry on micro-presses like Stop Press, 2 + 2 Press, and Zelot Press; she has worked over many years as an editor (including a former dayjob at Poets & Writers); and she currently co-hosts the Prose Pros reading series in New York. Born in the old South in the 1930s, her bohemian life started with a short stint at Black Mountain College in the 1950s and kept going from there. She's been a part of the New York arts scene since the 1950s and has been writing steadily since the 1970s. From 1983-93 she edited the poetry zine Giants Play Well in the Drizzle and in the mid-90s she published a series called the Northern Lights Poetry Chaplets. I'm looking forward to reading her book of short stories, North & South, about which fiction author Lucia Berlin said, "I like especially how King can nail down class in the USA--from the South to the New York art world."

If you've been following my Best of the Small Press 2011, you know that I have been posting indie press picks mainly from writers who visited Pittsburgh in 2011. Martha has never visited Pittsburgh, but some of her books have, via her most recent publisher, the innovative Spuyten Duyvil. Spuyten Duyvil (Brooklyn) was one of numerous indie publishers who came to Pittsburgh for the annual SPF: Small Press Festival in recent years. Since 2009, SPF has featured literary presses, letterpress publishers, and indie comix from Pittsburgh as well as Detroit, Buffalo, Nashville, Cleveland, New York, Massachusetts, and more. Find them here: http://www.spfpittsburgh.com/

*****

1. Learning to Draw/A History, Basil King (Skylight Press)
2. So Late into the Night, Elinor Nauen (Rain Mountain Press)
3. To be Read in the Dark, Maxine Chernoff (Omnidawn Press)

Recommended by Martha King
Author of North & South (Spuyten Duyvil)
http://www.blog.basilking.net

No Small Press Posts Today: Write Your Congressmen

2012-01-18T04:12:00.000-08:00

http://sopastrike.com/strike

*****

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 10.2

2012-01-16T13:49:00.000-08:00

Today's next round of small press picks come from Spencer Dew. I've had the pleasure of meeting Spencer, a prolific fiction writer and a whip-smart critic, twice when he's come to Pittsburgh to see a personal friend, and am grateful that he bothered to reach out to a few of us in the lit community while he was here. He's the author of a dark, perceptive collection of short stories, Songs of Insurgency (Vagabond Press, 2008), and a deservedly-praised book of criticism, Learning for Revolution: The Work of Kathy Acker (San Diego State University Press, 2011). Chicago's Another New Calligraphy produced a gorgeous edition of his short narrative in 2010, titled Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; his first novel, Maintain, is forthcoming from Ampersand Books in just a few months (April 2012).

I realized recently that it's nuts that I've never arranged a reading for Spencer during his travels to Pittsburgh and plan to rectify that the next time he announces a visit. Thinking out loud, I would probably try to get him into the monthly TNY Presents series, or a reading at the soon-to-open downtown location of Awesome Books, or maybe an event at the dive bar Belvedere's. For a local reader, I might pair him up with short story author Damian Dressick, or budding experimentalist Tait McKenzie Johnson, or former Cyberpunk Apocalypse resident, Gunner.

*****

1. The Body is a Little Guilded Cage: A Story in Letters and Fragments, Kristina Marie Darling (Gold Wake Press)

“The cathedral heaves,” and a needle reads a groove, making music, melancholy, in this haunting treasure of fragments, an entrancing Cornell box crafted from bits of HD’s letters. Freud leaves his traces here, too, little statuettes and canopic jars, in a book that manages to mimic the structure of dreams.

2. The Field, Martin Glaz Serup (Les Figues Press)

There a pun, in the original Danish, between the poet’s first name and “Marken” or field, and here, lonely against the white space of the page, we have assorted musings about that field, identityy as a chain of idiosyncrasies, desires. As a fresh and addictive template for autobiography, it will realign how you think about your "self."

3. Sunset at the Temple of Olives, Paul Suntup (Write Bloody Books)

Startlingly motley, every page of this collection of poems jars the reader with unexpected juxtapositions and shimmering turns of the colloquial. Reading this book is as close as most of us will get to an afternoon playing Frogger with actual timber trucks, actual pipe bombs, and pudding after, on a squishy couch that sighs as you sink back into it.

4. Hot Teen Slut, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (Write Bloody Books)

Poverty-struck poet lands a cubicle job in the pornography industry, but inexhaustible good humor and a resolute belief in poetry's ability to offer at least a temporary anecdote to the oppressions of the status quo makes this book like one of those little hypos of adrenaline folks carry in case of emergency.

Recommended by Spencer Dew

Author of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, and the forthcoming novel Maintain
www.spencerdew.com

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 10.1

2012-01-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

Today's small press recommendations come from poet Randall Mann, who visited Pittsburgh for a reading at Chatham University in October. Mann is the author of two collections of poetry, Breakfast with Thom Gunn (University of Chicago, 2009), shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and California Book Award; and Complaint in the Garden (Zoo/Orchises, 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize. Read Mann's poem, "Breakfast with Thom Gunn," here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/242774

Chatham University and its MFA writing program (recently named one of the top Five Innovative/Unique MFA Writing Programs by Atlantic Magazine) offer the Pittsburgh literary scene an expanded forum for excellent events revolving around poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. They host readings by visiting writers of national reputation and by their own talented faculty and alumni, organize writing colloquia such as the Bridges to Other Worlds Annual Literary Festival, and team up with local entities such as Autumn House Press. The MFA Program also sponsors an off-campus reading series run by grad students, Word Circus, held at the monthly art crawl, Unblurred.

*****

1. A Fast Life, Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books)
2. Sanderlings, Geri Doran (Tupelo Press)
3. Red Clay Weather, Reginald Shepherd (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Recommended by Randall Mann

Author of Breakfast with Thom Gunn (University of Chicago Press) and Complaint in the Garden (Zoo/Orchises).

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/randall-mann

Chapbook Review: Creamsicle Blue by Mike DeCapite

2012-01-15T09:42:00.000-08:00

Mike DeCapite, Creamsicle Blue. Brooklyn: Sparkle Street Books, 2011. Prose. 27 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9666592-5-2.

Creamsicle Blue is a spectacular piece of writing. Creamsicle Blue is the name of a new chapbook by Mike DeCapite. It contains 27 pages of prose; it takes place in New York and Cleveland and San Francisco and the road in between them; I am hard-pressed to classify it.

I received Creamsicle Blue in the mail on Friday. Soon after I hung up my coat at the end of my work week, I opened the chapbook, printed handsomely with a letterpress cover. I just wanted to glance at the first paragraph or two to get an upshot of the subject matter. But I was drawn in immediately, and didn't put it down until I finished. DeCapite writes about the end of a troubled relationship, and about the end of his father's life; but more than either, he attempts to write the abyss left (or revealed) by those endings. These losses leave him awake in the middle of the night, literally and figuratively, facing what he is and isn't willing to face, what he is and isn't willing to write.

The same night I finished Creamsicle Blue, I dreamt that some non-existent jacket copy said the book was like a "soulfriend" and that the author had traveled often enough to describe places he saw in a fresh and unjaded way. "Soulfriend"—that certainly describes a particular type of book for me. Not a diverting read, not "an entertainment," but a walk down the path with a writer who is honest (and probing) enough that even a personal, specific story strikes at some deeply-felt, shared realizations and unsentimentalized truths.

I especially like watching as DeCapite does the work of getting past his own resistance to his story; he stays with the story long enough to write around his own blocks. Whether he knows it or not, he writes for me, the reader, naming things I've felt but rarely articulated, because they're unpopular or unacceptable thoughts or tendencies, and I've resisted my own writing in their direction. DeCapite understands this unpopularity; he writes through a similar discomfort. And his writer's labor yields rewards. I felt while reading Creamsicle Blue that I was experiencing the gradual recognitions and awarenesses that come from the folding-together of thinking, feeling, writing, and living. That is, sometimes life and writing can seem like two parallel realms—but writing about one's life with a clean enough motivation (considering life as lived and felt) can change both the life and the writing and become a third realm. The author describes walking through the Met and being struck by a tiny Rembrandt drawing of the artist's mother, and remembering why we bother to try to capture something in art: "…it was done with such directness and precision and honesty, and with such obvious love, for his mother and for the truth of that moment and for the details of the world, that it changed my mood. It elevated me. It was a moment that hadn't escaped—this look that passed across this woman's face nearly 400 years ago—one moment that hadn't gone down the black drain of time. Score one for the artists, against death!" So, too, does DeCapite record with precision some small but vital moments of his life and consciousness, saving them from indifference, nonexistence, or the wash of time.

I'm reminded by Creamsicle Blue of what one art school professor used to say to us, that society pressures us to "hold ourselves together" but the work of an artist is the opposite—to break things apart (even ourselves) and expose their mechanisms. After reading DeCapite's chapbook I didn't feel like I'd watched some characters or scenes the writer painted for my mind's eye, as much as I felt naked. I felt like he'd exposed or unraveled some pieces of me I wasn't entirely comfortable revealing. Not only unraveled parts of me, but showed me how I was trying to hold those parts together, against their will. Though uncomfortable, I also relaxed a little after reading Creamsicle Blue, as if to say, There's no need to strain in that direction anymore.

This chapbook may be the essence of the small press, to my mind. Twenty-seven pages of the author's head, a few months or several years of the author's life, nothing the publisher's marketing department can brand. It's like a delicate, subtle poem by an unknown poet, but without the literary niceties that charm readers into reading even difficult poems. It's not quite an essay, though I think it does some of the mental work that essays do. It doesn't have quite the shape of a story, though it may have the scope of a novel; and I don't think it's what people call Creative Nonfiction, though that genre might choose to claim it. If I decided to call it anything, I might call it a writer's meditation. Following the uncharted, DeCapite forges a path found only by writing in the quietest moments, by paying attention to the silences in between words and events, and by walking around his city, struggling with the unsayable.

*****

Creamsicle Blue is available in Brooklyn at Spoonbill & Sugartown and Book Thug Nation, in Toronto at Volume, and in Cleveland at Mac's Backs and Visible Voice Books. On the web you can buy the book (and read more about the author) at Sparkle Street Books:
http://www.sparklestreet.com/MikeDecapite.html

Interview at Sensitive Skin Magazine

2012-01-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

Author Bart Plantenga has been busy. He's been systematically interviewing all the small press web hosts who published a chapter of his "simultaneously serialized" web novel, BEER MYSTIC, and running these interviews as a blog called the Beer Mystic Burp. The blog appears at Sensitive Skin Magazine, one of my favorite small press finds in recent years. In fact, Sensitive Skin was a print journal from the early '90s that went on hiatus for a decade and a half, then reappeared in 2010 as a web journal. I love the edgy stance, brazen voice, and high quality of the writing at SS, and I love the way the online mag manages to retain all the gritty flavor of a great print journal of the underground. And now the cycle has come around; the mag is back in print, and also starting to publish print books. In its own words, Sensitive Skin publishes "post-beat, pre-apocalyptic fiction, essays and poetry."

Karen the Small Press Librarian ran one of Bart's densely lovely chapters from Beer Mystic here almost exactly a year ago, and so I had the honor of being interviewed recently for his blog. I really appreciated our conversation and Bart's in-depth questions (in an age of short attention spans, no less). We talked about indie bookstores as American refuge, what got revealed in the St. Mark's Bookshop rent crisis, art vs. activism, Occupy Wall Street and the malleable nature of The 99%, and the place of creative writers in the larger public forum, among other topics. I thank Bart for his kind words and thoughtful inquiries. Please follow the link below to read the interview:

"Books--Increasingly Illegal Intoxicants?"
December 29, 2011
Sensitive Skin Magazine
Bart Plantenga interviews Karen Lillis, aka Karen the Small Press Librarian

http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/beer-mystic-burp-16-books-–-increasingly-illegal-intoxicants-an-interview-with-karen-lillis/

Follow Bart Plantenga's serialized web novel BEER MYSTIC across 44 websites here: http://bartyodel3.wordpress.com/about/

Guest Review: Laurie Weeks Reviewed by Kari Larsen

2012-01-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

Laurie Weeks, Zipper Mouth. New York: Feminist Press, 2011. Fiction. 144 pages. ISBN: 978-1-55861-755-3.

Laurie Weeks' Zipper Mouth is the story of a girl living in New York. New York is populated by jobs she hates as well as parties that facilitate ecstatic transformation, but the scenery is dwarfed by her unbearable, thunderous desire. This girl, without apprehension, is accessed by her desire on every level she has ever operated - as a child falling wordlessly for celebrities, as a teenager aching to establish a dialogue with Sylvia Plath - and Weeks conducts this chorus with a kind of mastery that is endlessly positive for young girls to see. Her story demonstrates how it is alright and it is beautiful for girls to want hard - for a better job, for love, for recognition, for things they cannot verbalize. While Weeks does come off through her intimate storytelling as the kind of writer young readers will be dying to talk to once this book finds its way to them, a passionate reading and re-reading of this book will serve to reassert that Weeks does everything right, provides all the words about desire for girls who do or did not have them. With this novel, Weeks has nailed it. Any young girl who reads Zipper Mouth will be armed with the reassurance and sense of belonging in her own desires that stories unconcerned with the scope and power of her own person fail to provide her. It is books of such indifference that make up the majority of what girls are prone to reading, and for the sake of teenagers, Zipper Mouth deserves the ubiquity of a series like Gossip Girl.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, small press fiction, New York fiction, feminist fiction, women writing fiction, and queer fiction.

Guest review by Kari Larsen
Editor of Enigma Machine Press
Author of the forthcoming chapbook, Say You're a Fiction from Dancing Girl Press (summer 2012)
Blogger at: http://cold-rubies.blogspot.com/

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 9.2

2011-12-30T11:33:00.000-08:00

Poet Kris Collins reads at Awesome Books, Pittsburgh.

September 2011.

More small press recommendations today come from Kris Collins, one of Pittsburgh's small press movers and shakers. I think of Kris as "the bard of Pittsburgh" because I love the tavern's-eye view of the city found in his poems about his artist and writer friends gathered around beer, hope, smoke, frustration, and transition. Not only does he write richly moody scenes evoking the ghosts of Pittsburgh's past peeking through as the former "Steel City" aggressively remakes it present, but he chronicles the last few decades of the city's bohemians as well as anyone I've heard or read. His most serious competition may be the authors he's started publishing on his small press of limited edition poetry books: Low Ghost Press features two of Pittsburgh's most keen-eyed poets, John Grochalski (now a 'Burgh ex-pat living in New York) and Bob Pajich. Kris doesn't care about competition. He'll even read poems by other people at his own readings.

Kris manages one of my favorite bookstores in town, Caliban Books, and runs Desolation Row Records out of that store. He has been an active member of The New Yinzer litmag for several years and co-hosted their reading series with writer Savannah Schroll Guz for its first few seasons.

*****

1. Past All Traps, Don Wentworth (Six Gallery Press)

2. Spared, Angele Ellis (Main Street Rag)

3. Six Stories, David Lewis (The National Folk Art Foundation)

Kris Collins
Editor of Low Ghost Press
http://lowghostpress.blogspot.com/

Recommended reading: John Grochalski on Low Ghost Press.

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 9.1

2011-12-30T05:45:00.000-08:00

Today's small press recommendations come from J.C. Hallman, author of fiction and non-fiction. He came to Pittsburgh in September to read his riveting prose piece, "Spate and Spite," as the runner-up winner of a contest to write about The Night. His story looked back on his time as a casino employee in Atlantic City, while he recalled a run of suicides in that gambling town. The writing was excellent. It was not like what I think of as memoir; it was more like he used his casino-worker (former) self as a character in a meditative novel, a dark lens through which to attempt to comprehend who jumps from hotel roofs in Atlantic City and why. Or who works too long in a windowless casino and why. The piece also employed journalism, weaving seamlessly in and out of stories about the deceased and stories of the casino.

The event was hosted by Creative Nonfiction, the first literary journal to devote itself exclusively to this genre, almost 20 years ago. Founded by Lee Gutkind (who also started the first MFA program for Creative Nonfiction), CNF is a great resource for writers and readers of this evolving genre, and the most well-known journal based in Pittsburgh. At the reading (which was also a release party for issue #42), the editors announced a worldwide circulation of 6,000.

*****

1. To Assume a Pleasing Shape, Joseph Salvatore (BOA Editions)
2. Married But Looking, Daniel Libman (Livingston Press)

Recommended by J.C. Hallman
Author of The Hospital for Bad Poets (Milkweed Editions) and In Utopia (St. Martin's Press)
http://www.JCHallman.com/
http://WilliamAndHenryJames.blogspot.com

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 8.2

2011-12-24T11:05:00.000-08:00

More small press recommendations today come from Steve Himmer. Steve's own allegorical novel about the limits of solitude in a networked world, The Bee-Loud Glade (Atticus Books) has landed on numerous Best of 2011 lists: Namely on Jen Michalski's list earlier on this blog, as well as lists by Mel Bosworth, Sal Pane, Books on the Night Stand, NPR's On Point, Three Guys One Book, Book Page, and on the longlist for 3 AM Novel of the Year. See more here: http://www.stevehimmer.com/beeloud

Steve, who is based outside of Boston, came to Pittsburgh this year to read at The New Yinzer Presents series, along with a formidable small press lineup: Noah Gershman (Snail Press), Derek Pollard (BlazeVOX), and Traci O Connor (Tarpaulin Sky Press).

*****

1. TomorrowLand, Grant Bailie (Red Giant Books)
2. Tongue Party, Sara Rose Etter (Caketrain Press)
3. How The Days of Love & Diphtheria, Robert Kloss (Mud Luscious Press)

Recommended by Steve Himmer
Author of The Bee-Loud Glade and editor of Necessary Fiction
http://www.stevehimmer.com
http://www.necessaryfiction.com

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 8.1

2011-12-24T06:25:00.000-08:00

Tour poster for Anders Nilsen and his graphic novel Big Questions (Drawn & Quarterly).

In July, Chicago-based cartoonist and illustrator Anders Nilsen embarked on a lengthy book tour, hitting four countries in three months. His 600-page magnum opus, Big Questions, is the culmination of ten years of his drawings, and much-anticipated by the fans of this celebrated artist. In September he stopped in Pittsburgh (with Marc Bell) for a standing-room-only event at Copacetic Comics and (its downstairs neighbor) Lili Coffee Shop. Copacetic is one of Pittsburgh's great bookstores for a number of reasons, not least because owner Bill Boichel is a tireless champion of indie comics.

Today. Anders makes his 2011 small press recommendations, based on three months of browsing many of the world's best comic bookstores.

*****

1. Viande de Chevet, Various artists; Stephane Blanquet, Editor (UDA Press)
2. Going Back, Cathy G. Johnson (Self-published)
3. Quodlibet, Katja Spitzer (Nobrow)

Recommended by Anders Nilsen
Author of Big Questions (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011)
http://www.andersbrekhusnilsen.com/
http://themonologuist.blogspot.com/

Marc Bell, Bill Boichel, and Anders Nilsen outside of Lili Coffee Shop and Copacetic Comics. September 13, 2011. Photo by Larry Rippel.

Browsing at Copacetic Comics, Pittsburgh.

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 7.2

2011-12-23T20:42:00.000-08:00

Thirteen Designer Vaginas: Poems by Juliet Cook on
Hyacinth Girl Press.

Juliet Cook is relentless, and readers like me are thankful for it. This Columbus, Ohio-based poet keeps finding new ways to write about the body, the feminine, and the macabre, as she explores and fine-tunes her unique voice. She's also the master of the chapbook, as the editor of Blood Pudding Press, where she's been known to publish both herself and others. The latest chapbook of her own poems is Thirteen Designer Vaginas, which appeared this year on a new Pittsburgh chapbook press, Hyacinth Girl Press. Pittsburgh poet Margaret Bashaar (co-founder of The TypewriterGirls Poetry Cabaret) is the editor of this new undertaking. Margaret has also started a new Pittsburgh reading series. Titled the 2 by 4 Reading Series, these literary evenings are designed to promote and present collaborative writings: four reading sets by two writers each. The first 2 x 4 Reading happened in October 2011 and included Juliet Cook teamed up with Margaret herself.

*****

1. many lost cause creatures could form a very sad list, Krystal Languell (Dusie Kollektiv 5)

2. the last will be stone, too (excerpts), Deborah Poe (Dusie Kollektiv 5)

3. BARCELONA POEMS, Mark Lamoureux (Dusie Kollektiv 5)

Recommended by Juliet Cook
Author of POST–STROKE (Dusie Kollektiv 5) & Thirteen Designer Vaginas (Hyacinth Girl Press) and more at http://julietcook.weebly.com/

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 7.1

2011-12-23T18:59:00.000-08:00

Writer Josh Barkan in front of the Edgar Thompson Works, U.S. Steel,
Braddock, Pennsylvania. This mill has been in operation since 1872.

Writer Sherrie Flick is best known in Pittsburgh as a master of flash fiction, the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books, 2009), and the co-director of the beloved Gist Street Reading Series. Though the curtain went down on Gist Street last year (after a triumphant decade), Sherrie has followed that act by co-founding a writer's residency in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a borough just 10 minutes drive from Pittsburgh city limits. Braddock is one of the hardest-hit steel towns of the rust belt, having lost over 90% of its population. Ironically, it is also home of one of the last two working steel mills in Allegheny County. But in recent years, the town has been getting the most attention for its young mayor, who is trying to revive the place by luring artists to fill empty houses and by offering free and cheap industrial spaces to arts organizations.

Today's small press recommendations come from Josh Barkan, the first writer-in-residence hosted by INTO THE FURNACE, Sherrie's new venture. Author of the satirical novel, Blind Speed (Northwestern University Press, 2008), Josh is also a world traveler who calls both New York City and Mexico City home. I haven't yet seen him read, but I did get to meet him briefly when he was marching with a mutual friend in the Occupy Pittsburgh demonstration on October 15.

*****

1. Trophy: A Novel, Michael Griffith (Northwestern University Press)
2. God Bless America: Stories, Steve Almond (Lookout Books)
3. The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, Deborah Baker (Graywolf Press)

Recommended by Josh Barkan

Author of Blind Speed: A Novel and Before Hiroshima: The Confession of Murayama Kazuo and Other Stories, current writer-in-residence of Into the Furnace in Braddock, PA.
http://www.joshbarkan.com

*****

The name of the writers residency, INTO THE FURNACE, is a reference to a 1941 novel set in Braddock called Out of This Furnace. The novel was written by Thomas Bell. For more info on the residency, see: http://intothefurnace.wordpress.com/

View of the steel mill from the front porch of the residency, Braddock, Pennsylvania. Photo by Josh Barkan.

Remembering a Great Storyteller

2011-12-19T11:14:00.000-08:00

Richard Leck (February 17, 1933 – December 19, 2008)

Today we remember Richard Leck, who died peacefully on this date three years ago. Richard was a poet and a storyteller, an Army veteran from between wars, a Hudson County native (where he lived for over four decades), a resident of the East Village, and a veteran of the Greenwich Village café scene of the 1960s.

I met Richard when I was working at St Mark’s Bookshop and we quickly became friends due to his being such an entertaining customer. For the last two years of his life, we were collaborating on his memoirs (JUMPED, FELL, OR WAS PUSHED, still in progress), which he described as “comedy sociology.” Our writing project was a happy accident for each of us. Richard was waiting for someone to listen to all his stories and I was waiting for someone to tell me what had gone down in Jersey City (the city of my grandfather’s childhood) in the early part of the 20th Century. Whenever Richard talked, I took notes, and soon we decided to stop calling it “having coffee” and start calling it “writing a book.” I am hugely grateful for all that Richard and his stories taught me: How to listen, how to appreciate what you have, how to stay young and grow old gracefully, how to survive the rough patches with humor, how to figure out what's important and ignore the rest, how to forgive your own past, and especially how to tell stories. I learned more from absorbing his storytelling rhythm for two years that I ever would in any MFA writing program. Hell, maybe Richard Leck WAS my MFA program.

Richard was a very funny man. His literary memorial service had us all laughing like the best Irish wakes always do. Some small press superstars joined Words Like Kudzu Press to read from Richard’s stories and poems for the memorial, held at the Bowery Poetry Club in May 2009. Participants included Margarita Shalina (small press buyer at St Mark’s Bookshop and translator of Chekov’s The Duel, Melville House Press); writer Brian Cogan (Encyclopedia of Punk); novelist Arthur Nersesian (Akashic Books); poet Bob Holman (founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, poetry activist); poet Jackie Sheeler (Earthquake Came to Harlem, NYQ Books); poet Steve Dalachinsky (The Final Nite & Other Poems, Ugly Duckling Presse); writer Mike Faloon (The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock on Gorsky Press and editor of Go Metric Zine); and storyteller Tom Hendrickson (Whack & Blight Press).

Follow this link to listen to the readings from Richard’s memoirs and his poems:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF79DD06C41AB9E25

Follow this link to read an excerpt from Richard’s memoirs:
"You Could Make a Bet on a Street Corner as Easy as Buying a Newspaper"
Go Metric Zine
http://gometric.typepad.com/gometric/2009/04/you-could-make-a-bet-on-a-street-corner-as-easy-as-buying-a-newspaper-part-i.html

Read the Village Voice appreciation of Richard Leck here:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2009/01/richard_leck_19.php

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 6

2011-12-17T06:27:00.000-08:00

Today's small press picks are from me. These are the Top Three 2011 Small Press Novels I Can't Wait To Read.

My favorite sub-genre of fiction is the female novella, or short novels (by women writers) which read like novellas. The ones I'm most interested in are from the point of view of one female character and are often written in first person. I'm especially fond of books where a strong and original voice propels the story from beginning to end. This year I read numerous books that fit this category: I loved the bitter and paranoid voice of the narrator in The Appointment by Herta Muller (Metropolitan Books, 2001) and the obsession of Breathe by Anne-Sophie Brasme (St Martin's Griffin, 2001). Lucker and Tiffany Peel Out by Eroica Mildmay (Serpent's Tail, 1993) used a biting, sardonic voice to skillfully combine an uneasy domestic fiction and wide-eyed road trip novel in one, while It Was Gonna Be Like Paris by Emily Listfield (Dial Press, 1984) uses a young artist narrator to create an edgy domestic fiction set in the bohemian New York '80s. I also fell in love with short novels by Anne Roiphe and Dawn Powell and revisited some of my favorites by Jean Rhys.

The books I can't wait to read from 2011 are these three:

1. Zipper Mouth, Laurie Weeks (Feminist Press, 2011)
I saw Laurie Weeks read in 2000 with Michelle Tea's Sister Spit and adored her writing. She had a compelling, nervous energy onstage and her story (about Vivien Leigh, among other subjects) went unexpected places. I've been waiting 11 years for this debut novel to come out; so have many others, and they say it's worth every minute of the wait. More at Feminist Press:
http://www.feministpress.org/books/laurie-weeks/zipper-mouth

2. Green Girl, Kate Zambreno (Emergency Press, 2011)
Everything I've read about Green Girl makes me want to read it. For starters, Kate Durbin has described the protagonist as "literature's lost girl," comparing her to a Jean Rhys character, a Sylvia Plath character, and a Clarice LiSpector character. Sign me up. More (including links to reviews) at Emergency Press: http://emergencypress.org/green-girl.html

3. Zazen, Vanessa Veselka (Red Lemonade, 2011)
I just started reading this novel and already I'm in love with the smart and jaded tone of the narrator. As with Kathy Acker novels, I keep throwing the book across the room every few paragraphs because the sentences are so good I'm jealous. In case that sounds like a statement on the "craft" of writing, I don't mean it as such; the subtle power of the narrator's thoughts and voice are what blow me away. In other words, I like what she dares to say, and I like how directly she dares to say it. More at Red Lemonade: http://redlemona.de/vanessa-veselka/zazen

Recommended by Karen Lillis

Author of The Second Elizabeth (Six Gallery Press) and i, scorpion (Words Like Kudzu Press)

http://karenslibraryblog.blogspot.com/

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 5

2011-12-16T07:32:00.000-08:00

Jenna Freedman reads from one of her zines at Lili Coffee Shop.
July 1, 2011, Pittsburgh. Photo by Artnoose.

Zine librarian Jenna Freedman came to Pittsburgh this July on The Orderly Disorder: Zinester Librarians in Circulation Tour with a small troupe of librarians who were on the road in between the ALA conference in New Orleans and the Zine Librarians (Un)Conference in Milwaukee. Jenna is a zine librarian at Barnard College, and a very active member of the Radical Reference Librarians; she has helped catalog the Occupy Wall Street Library. I got to see Jenna speak in my first semester of library school, and she was a large part of my inspiration to focus my studies on small press cataloging and collections. Jenna blogs at the Lower East Side Librarian, and she often reviews zines and small press books. This year she is recommending three zines and three books and she's included links to her reviews of each title.

Pittsburgh's own master of zines, Artnoose, organized the Pittsburgh reading for Jenna & friends, which was held in Polish Hill at Lili Coffee Shop. (See Day 3 for my ode to Lili). Artnoose (who was based in the Bay Area for many years) writes, typesets, and prints the zine Ker-Bloom!; I'm a big fan of her storytelling, and her letterpressed zines have a great visual aesthetic, too. She relocated to Pittsburgh a few years ago and is now a resident at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writers House, a space dedicated to supporting writing-in-progress, with an emphasis on zine writers.

*****

Jenna recommends three zines:

1. White Elephants #4, Katie Haegele (Self-published zine)
http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/reviews/haegele/whiteelephants4

2. Big Zine, Little Zine, Milo Miller (Self-published zine)
http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/reviews/miller/bigzinelittlezine

3. The Shortest Day, Celia C. Perez (Self-published zine)
http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/reviews/perez/shortestday

And three books:

1. Dragon Chica, May-lee Chai (GemmaMedia)
http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/reviews/chai/dragonchica

2. Repeat After Me, Rachel DeWoskin (Overlook Press)
http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/reviews/dewoskin/repeatafterme

3. Grrrl, Jennifer Whiteford (Gorsky Press)
http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/reviews/whiteford/grrrl

Recommended by Jenna Freedman
Zine librarian, Radical Reference librarian, and zinester
http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/

RIP George Whitman and Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 4

2011-12-15T08:40:00.001-08:00

Writer in Residence is Mark Spitzer's memoir of living at
Shakespeare and Company (Paris) in the late '90s.

I was sad to hear this morning about the death of George Whitman, legendary expat bookseller of Paris for almost 60 years. I was lucky enough to spend some time with George (surely one of the great characters of the 20th Century) in his incarnation of Shakespeare & Company in 2000 and 2001. George made me pancakes, gave me a reading, put my novel in the window, and vacated his bed for me, as he did for so many writers and other artists who came through his bookstore over the years. I remember him snarling at customers, getting warm hugs from the young ballerina who was sleeping in the bookstore in those days, and giving himself a "haircut" with a candle. (He'd burn his hair and then pat out the flames.)

Today’s small press recommendations come from Mark Spitzer, who (in a sense) got me to the unique English-language bookstore. This renegade editor (Exquisite Corpse, Toad Suck Review), translator (Bataille, Genet, Celine), and author of novels, nonfiction, and poems wrote a letter of introduction to George Whitman for my poet friend Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle to stay at Shakespeare; when I first met Geoffrey a few months later, his stories of Paris and George Whitman inspired me to travel to the city of the Surrealists and to sleep at Shakespeare & Co.

I finally met Mark Spitzer in 2011 when he came to Pittsburgh for a July reading organized by local publishers Six Gallery Press and Low Ghost Press. Six Gallery was featuring his new book, Proze Attack, the second book of Spitzer's collected works to be published on this rebel press. Sharing the stage that night were Pittsburgh poets Kris Collins, Margaret Bashaar, Don Wentworth, Jason Baldinger, Lucy Goubert, and Bob Pajich. At the reading, I picked up a copy of Spitzer's tribute to Shakespeare & Company, Writer in Residence: Memoir of a Literary Translator (University of New Orleans Press, 2010), and quickly devoured his compelling story of translating exciting texts by French avant garde authors, dealing with cranky small press editors, staking out his territory at Shakespeare & Co and then literally repairing it as it crumbled, and falling in love and lust with other bookstore habitués. But throughout this memoir also runs the touching, well-drawn, and hilarious story of his friendship with George Whitman. His chapters perfectly capture the contradictions of the man who was one of the most grumpy bookmen of them all, but who was also one of the most generous softies. George was a longtime friend to the avant garde, with emphasis on “friend”: He seemed to value friendship at least as much as he cared about books, revolution, or literature. I am grateful for Mark Spitzer's written memories of George and for his small press picks below.

*****

1. Emergency Room Wrestling, The Dirty Poet (Words Like Kudzu Press)
2. House Organ, no. 76, Kenneth Warren, ed. (House Organ)
3. Blank, Davis Schneiderman (Jaded Ibis Press)

Recommended by Mark Spitzer
Author of Proze Attack (Six Gallery Press)
http://www.sptzr.net/

*****
Check out:

Writer in Residence: Memoir of a Literary Translator
By Mark Spitzer
http://www.amazon.com/Writer-Residence-Memoir-Literary-Translater/dp/1608010201

A memory of George Whitman by expat poet Eddie Woods:
“A Place to Change Trains”
http://www.parisiana.com/node/125

My own memoir chapter of Shakespeare & Company:
“A Bookman’s Holiday in Paris”
http://www.undiepress.com/2011/02/15/a-bookmans-holiday-in-paris/

New York Times obituary of George Whitman
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/books/george-whitman-paris-bookseller-and-cultural-beacon-is-dead-at-98.html

Best of the Small Press 2011: Day 3

2011-12-14T04:53:00.000-08:00

Sueyeun Juliette Lee reads at Lili Coffee Shop to a packed house. Pittsburgh, September 2011.

In September, I was happy to be introduced to the work of three poets I didn't know when Dawn Lundy Martin organized a poetry reading with herself and visiting writers, Nick Demske and Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Today's small press recommendations come from Sueyeun Juliette Lee, whose poems tell us, "Resistance can be subtle and vicious." Juliette also edits chapbooks at Corollary Press.

A dense amount of literary energy was packed into the cozy space of Lili Coffee Shop that night. Lili is one of my favorite places in Pittsburgh--whenever I go there, I run into artists and writers I know, or meet new ones. It's a true cafe in that 1960s sense--you'll see a few people pecking away at laptops, but mostly it's full of conversation. It doesn't hurt that it shares an old brick building with a record shop and a bookstore. Lili regularly generates its own events (music and readings), and often pairs up with the 3rd floor bookstore (Copacetic Comics) for book parties with writers or comic artists.

*****

Sueyeun Juliette Lee writes:

"I'd like to take the opportunity to recommend three Asian American authors who are doing incredible work, work that really pushes against the expectations of what "Asian American" literature ought to look like. The first two in particular take on "traditional" Asian American themes, such as displacement, family, and language, but in completely radical ways that I think regenerate the field."

1. Insomnia and the Aunt, by Tan Lin (Kenning Editions)
"I wrote a review of Tan Lin's book over at Constant Critic, where I'm a contributor."
See: http://www.constantcritic.com/sueyeun_juliette_lee/kenning-editions-pamela-lu’s-ambient-parking-lot-and-tan-lin’s-insomnia-and-the-aunt/

2. Entwine, by Jai Arun Ravine (TinFish Press)
"I'm a big fan of Jai's, having published Jai's chapbook with Corollary a few years ago. Jai is a multi-faceted artist, writer, and performer whose work I always find challenging and stimulating."

3. Daughter; a Novel, by Janice Lee (Jaded Ibis Press)
"A confession. I haven't read Daughter by Janice Lee yet, but am recommending it solely on the basis of my impression of her as a thinker and critic. I'm still waiting to receive my copy (it's a limited edition release--so folks should hurry before it disappears!) but am a HUGE supporter of folks coming out of the CalArts system."

Recommended by Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Author of That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Books) and Underground National (Factory School)
http://www.silentbroadcast.wordpress.com

Small Press Holiday Recommendations: Day 2 (2011)

2011-12-13T11:47:00.000-08:00

I first met Baltimore writer/editor Jen Michalski when she came to Pittsburgh to read at The New Yinzer Presents series around 2008. I loved her stories then, and I listened even closer when she came back to the series in April of this year: She read a haunting fiction excerpt of a father and daughter, of tenuous reconnections, fragile hopes, and broken hearts. I can't wait until this novel sees print. Until then, you'll have to enjoy her story collection, Close Encounters (So New Media) and her winning novella, May-September in The 2010 Press 53 Open Awards Anthology.

The New Yinzer is a Pittsburgh literary magazine that's been around for a decade as an online publication with occasional print anthologies in beautiful editions. The reading series they host (in an art gallery that doubles as an indie music venue) features 3 or 4 readers each month and does a great job of bringing together Pittsburgh's favorite local poets and storytellers, new and unknown writers, small press writers passing through Pittsburgh, and enthusiastic audiences.

*****

1. Death Wishing, Laura Ellen Scott (Ig Publishing)
2. Kiss Me Stranger, Ron Tanner (Ig Publishing)
3. The Bee-Loud Glade, Steve Himmer (Atticus Books)

Recommended by Jen Michalski, author of Close Encounters and From Here, editor of jmww
http://jenmichalski.com/
http://jmww.150m.com

Small Press Holiday Recommendations for 2011

2011-12-12T05:19:00.000-08:00

Writer Lori Jakiela and poet Jimmy Cvetic confer at the bar (L) while Erin Valerio (R) sells tickets to Literary Death Match.

November 9, 2011, Brillobox Bar, Pittsburgh.

It's that time of year again! Best-of-the-small-press lists for 2011 will be appearing on this blog for the rest of the month. This year I'm asking for recommendations from writers and small press gurus who came to visit Pittsburgh (my current city) in 2011. The lovely Erin Valerio was my First Responder this year; I had the pleasure of meeting this Pittsburgh native when she brought Literary Death Match to Pittsburgh last month. If Literary Death Match comes to a city near you (and at 38 cities and growing, it very well might), you shouldn't miss the chance to attend. The format of this unique reading series combines comedy, hijinks, and seriously good readings to create an entertaining evening that is greater than the sum of its parts. Erin was thrilled to finally get the series to her hometown, and I think I heard her say that it all went even better than her wildest hopes. I, for one, was impressed and entertained. The excellent reading lineup consisted of Lori Jakiela (winner), Jimmy Cvetic, Lissa Brennan, and Adam Matcho. You can see photos and read a recap here.

***

1. God Bless America: Stories, Steve Almond (Lookout Books, 2011)
Steve Almond's latest is almost frighteningly perceptive. Equal parts wickedly funny and hugely, desperately sad, God Bless America is a true portrait of a nation -- not always pretty, but stunningly honest and self-aware.

2. Lamb, Bonnie Nadzam (Other Press, 2011)
Lamb is dark, unnerving, and quite frankly, a bit icky -- which is precisely why I love it. It's about a middle-aged man and a preteen girl on a road trip, but try to read it without thinking of Lolita.

3. Other People We Married, Emma Straub (FiveChapters Books, 2011)
Emma Straub works at one of Brooklyn's best indie bookstores, and when this book was released, there was a post-it note beneath it on the shelf which read "I wrote this book. Please buy it. I love you." This collection is as stellar as you'd expect from a prominent figure on the indie scene, so take her advice: buy it.

Recommended by Erin Valerio
Literary Death Match producer
http://www.literarydeathmatch.com

The Revolution Will Be Cataloged: Introducing OccupyWiki

2011-10-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of the day adding pages to the new wiki site, OccupyWiki. This site, created by Sarah Keefe, has an enormous potential. Specifically, its current structure asks for one page to be added for every city and town whose citizens have joined in the Occupy movement for solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. If these pages are added and then filled in with accurate information provided by citizen journalists, librarians, and/or participating demonstrators, it will become an invaluable information service and document of witness.

I stand in support of the Occupy Together movement. I believe that it is, at its core, not primarily a movement of the angry or the radical, but rather of many, many fed up citizens standing up to be counted. Citizens are being cut out of the civic conversation, civic and human values are being cut out of the national conversation, narrow interests have hijacked the phrases and vocabulary of the national rhetoric, and citizens are finally, at long last, stepping out of their houses to participate in a conversation in the street. To me, this is participatory democracy at its simplest. First, we step out of our isolation. Next, we stand together and have a conversation. And see where it goes.

I'd like to draw a distinction here about the internet's role in this movement. The Occupy movement is not something that is happening on Facebook, on the web, on petitions, or on Youtube. It is something that is happening in people's hearts and in the streets and in encampments. But the internet can sometimes help get the word out widely and quickly, and other times be an important witness, and still other times set the record straight against misinformation or under-reporting. I mean to stress that it is not enough to sign a petition, or follow the New York news stories, or enjoy the Flickr pages. I believe that the citizens everywhere need now to stand in the streets and be counted in person if they wish to make a show of strength against corporate rule. But I believe that OccupyWiki can help by bearing witness (in one place) and offering an accurate and easy-to-read document of how many people are marching, how many people are camping out, and how very many cities are "Occupying."

This past Saturday evening, when I was searching for news of which U.S. cities had held "Occupy" rallies and marches on October 15th (in a worldwide show of support for Occupy Wall Street), I was surprised. I was surprised at how little coverage there was of the U.S. protests, how hard it was to find clear and authoritative information, and how inaccurate, downplayed, and/or erratic was the information coming out of my own city's news sources (Pittsburgh). I'm happy to say we had about 2,000 marchers here, but the estimates given to the press were anywhere from "500" (one frequently-cited police estimate) to "3,000" (an organizer estimate) to "4,000" (a different police estimate). (It may be true that up to 3,000 participated throughout the day but that only about 2,000 were ever gathered at once.)

When I started working on OccupyWiki on Sunday, I was adding skeleton pages for American cities that have started Occupy movements. The first thing I would seek was an official webpage made by City X's organizers. Many cities' Occupiers have websites full of interesting information, event calendars, calls for donations for overnight demonstrators, and pages for photos and videos. On the one hand there are some impressive websites that have gone up very quickly. But on the other hand, the most time-consuming part of my wiki process was finding specific information on each website. Sometimes I couldn't tell from an elaborate website where the encampment was located, and sometimes I couldn't tell if the encampment was still intact. Many times the hardest thing to find on the site was direct contact information. This is another vote for a site like OccupyWiki. I find the format of a wiki a democratizing way of looking at information. Imagine if in one place you could see a list of all cities "Occupying," and then on each city's page, you knew you could find reliable categories of up-to-date information. How many people are spending the night to show their support. How much flack they've gotten from the police. Have they had local media problems like consistent under-reporting, low numbers reported, media blackouts (San Francisco), or hacked websites or Facebook pages (Philadelphia)? Or have they, like Cleveland or Los Angeles, had vocal support from the city itself? One librarian I corresponded with wants to know which occupations have libraries.

Meanwhile, users of Flickr and Youtube are contributing important visual documents of how many people are out on the streets, how creative their protests are, how energized are their marches. I'd love to see a Flickr pool for each city and a link to that pool on each OccupyWiki page. And Twitter continues to be recommended as the best way to get up-to-the-minute information from numerous citizens who are on the ground in each locale (more reliable as a whole than just following one Twitter account). I've been researching the hashtags for each city, which are sometimes just the obvious like #OccupySyracuse or #OccupyMadison, but other times a regional abbreviation like #OccupyNOLA, #OccupyPGH, or #OccupyCincy.

I was heartened, of course, to hear how many cities worldwide protested on October 15th, and the massive numbers in certain cities like Brussels and Madrid. But I'll admit I'm particularly heartened by the American protests, because Americans don't generally protest. And I'm afraid that the numerous American protests are being under-reported and mis-reported by the national media, and often enough by local news.

Which brings me to another thing I find democratic and necessary about the wiki format. If traditional journalism (a crucial branch of any healthy democracy) is failing us via both budget cuts (resulting in under reporting) and corporate ownership of news outlets (resulting in inaccurate reporting, slanted reporting, or media blackouts), then citizen journalism must save the day. I am not trying here to malign or dismiss journalists on the whole, but to stress that this Occupy movement will be perceived through not only editorials, blogs, and daily news reports, but through information itself. The citizens both inside and outside the movement deserve to see a clear and accurate picture of the Occupy protests, camps, numbers, and activities.

Sarah Keefe, who identifies with Occupy Boston, started the OccupyWiki (see OccupyWiki.info) with free, open-source software from MediaWiki on October 5, 2011 because she didn't find any other site like it on the web at the time. Inspired by a fellow Boston protester's crowdsourced document online, she originally created the wiki thinking it would be used by protesters who could amass and share "relevant reading, useful videos, news coverage, protesting and camping tips, and local information about their own protests." Now Keefe says she sees Occupywiki.org has cropped up since she last looked. In a web 2.0 world, it's hard to say if both will flourish, or if one will stress a different aspect than the other. But I am heartened by the Occupy movement itself and want to help show its true and accurate side through clearly-presented facts to citizens seeking to inform themselves.

Guest Review: LIFE AFTER SLEEP Reviewed by Joel Thomas

2011-09-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

Mark R. Brand. Life After Sleep. Chicago: CCLaP Publishing, 2011. Fiction (novella). Available as an e-book or in handbound edition. http://www.cclapcenter.com/lifeaftersleep/

Mark R. Brand’s sci-fi novella centers around the premise that through the wonders of science, humans can get by on significantly less sleep. A device referred to as a “Bed” allows for full rest in only two hours. Will we use the extra hours in our day for education, cultural enrichment, and making the world a better place? Will we finally get around to donating blood and going to the gym regularly? Or will we simply possess a few more hours each night to help us keep up with our favorite reality shows? Surely we can find more “Real Housewives” adventures to follow, and their own reduced need for sleep will provide even more snippy banter and social catastrophes.

Fortunately, Brand takes readers down a more interesting road. His own background in science and medicine informs the novella throughout, allowing him to provide detailed exposition and explanations of the technology itself and its effects on each protagonist. As we all know, the literary world of tomorrow’s technology often turns out to be a curse more than a blessing, and this novel displays the personal dystopia that is Life After Sleep. Capitalism always wins, of course, and readers soon learn that corporations expect humans to work many more hours, often for less pay. The most glaring example: a war veteran with PTSD working an inhumane number of hours at a futuristic version of Walmart. His Sleep (Brand refers to the shortened version of sleep with a capital letter: “Sleep”) struggles prove nearly devastating, as do the hallucinations of a rest-deprived surgeon who blacks out during operations.

Even with an overarching social theme, the narrative stays focused on individual lives rather than sweeping political statements. This move keeps the novella lean and intimate. Readers meet characters who stay vulnerable and believable, beset by problems and conflict but never forced into saving the world. One major narrative branch, for example, portrays the difficulties of a couple trying to adapt back to more traditional sleep patterns after having a baby. As it turns out, Beds aren’t safe to operate near infants. The young father/husband works too many hours without the benefits of a Bed and its technology-enhanced Sleep, and the young parents both struggle to adapt to their physical needs for rest. In another vein, a successful band promoter pushes the legal and physical limits of Sleep while dabbling in other intriguing technologies (which this reviewer will leave unspoiled so the reader can take pleasure in discovery). Her own desperate lifestyle brings a hedonism and danger-driven appeal to the book.

With Life After Sleep, Brand doesn’t push extremes, keeping a sense of relative believability. Some readers may prefer fantasies so unbelievable that the enjoyment comes from reveling in the seemingly impossible, but this novella’s appeal comes in its chilling likelihood.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, science fiction, medical fiction, and Chicago authors.

Available from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, or from Amazon.

Reviewed by Joel Thomas
Midwestern adjunct writing instructor
http://thecasserolex.wordpress.com/

Important Week for an Important Bookstore

2011-09-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

Image from Marty After Dark

By now, you've probably heard about the Cooper Square Committee petition to save St. Mark's Bookshop by asking Cooper Union (the bookstore's landlord) for lower rent. The petition response has been amazing, with over 23,000 signatures gathered in less than a week; every time I look at the petition, there are 1,000 more signatures. Many of those signing have left enthusiastic comments about the bookstore and what it means to them, or strong words addressing the irony of an academic landlord who might boot such an intellectual institution out of the neighborhood:

"Please don't let this bookstore close! It would be a disaster. It's one of my favorite bookstores in the world."

"St. Marks is NECESSARY!!! Cooper Union shouldn't be behaving like a commercial landlord -- there's an intellectual heritage at stake."

"Find the pride to claim the St. Mark's Bookstore, a cultural and historical icon, as part of the Cooper Union community."

"Please help this great literary institution to survive. There is no other bookstore with their taste and selection. In a time when we are almost out of places in NYC to find books of the calibre St. Mark's Bookshop selects, it is an essential cultural and historical part of our city."

"one of the most important independent bookstores left in the country."

"Please, the city is slowly losing its soul.... "

If a fraction of those who signed the petition spent $25 at the bookstore this week, it would make an enormous difference to an uniquely wonderful bookstore. It is my humble observation that St. Mark's Bookshop, having been a player in the center of a thriving multi-disciplinary art scene for three decades, has fostered the creation and growth of many small presses and literary journals, and facilitated conversations and connections between many influential artists, writers, and intellectuals. Meanwhile, e-books (and their intersection with Amazon and iPad) seem to be reaching a savvy demographic of readers (many of whom have loathed the chain stores), dealing heavy blows to longtime brick and mortars just as Barnes & Noble's deep-discounts did to local indie bookstores in the 1990s.

But e-books can't be the whole demise of great bookstores, since St. Mark's is one of the many stores that sells Google e-books. Perhaps more to blame is the skyrocketing Manhattan rent that threatens to strangle all but the chain stores. When I lived in New York in the Giuliani years, rumor had it that many of the chain stores (which Mayor Rudy had courted with tax breaks), including Barnes and Noble and Nike, didn't actually make a profit on their New York stores. But they paid exorbitant prices just to maintain a high-profile, big-city "flagship" store. So if no one can actually afford their New York rent, what does that mean for the continuing culture of a great city? To paraphrase a Jim Jarmusch quote from the 2010 documentary "Blank City," New York was always a trading post, but now the main trade is real estate itself.

I do think that this week in particular is an important time for indie bookstore lovers to give more than just their signature. The Village Voice reported on Monday, September 12th, that St Mark's owners are due to meet this week (Wednesday, September 14) with Cooper Union's Vice President of Finance, Adminstration, and Treasury, in order to negotiate a rent reduction--but that "the new administration has not been 'particularly sympathetic.' "

Won't you please show your support in the form of buying a book from St. Mark's Bookshop THIS WEEK? You can browse their selection online via title, author, new arrivals, store bestsellers, autographed copies, remainders, or Google e-books:
http://www.stmarksbookshop.com/
212-260-7853

*****

Update: Since I posted this late yesterday afternoon, the petition signatures are up to 24,500.

New comments on the petition:

[Dr. ____ from Berlin] "St. Mark's is the only top quality bookstore in NYC. The staggering selection, extensive and discriminatingly selected, is unparalleled - none of the big chains and none of the smaller ones (with their necessarily narrower focus) come close to this unique institution. I send all my students, colleagues, friends heading for NY to St. Mark's. Don't liquidate New York's most respectable Bookstore!"

"How is New York City going to continue to be a literary and cultural center if we lose all of our independent bookstores?"

*****

Note: It is true that I am not only a disinterested bookstore blogger in this case; I am not unbiased. I am a former employee of St. Mark's Bookshop, with years of memories and friendships there. I am also currently writing a book about my years at the store. I should add, however, that I am not writing about my time there just to write a fun memoir about my own life; the bookstore itself was largely the inspiration. St. Mark's Bookshop is such an unique gathering place in the heart of the city of art, the city of publishing, I want to help give it its legend in print; it is certainly long overdue.

August 10th Book Party: Chicago Center for Literature and Photography Celebrates Four Years

2011-08-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

Jason Pettus is a writer, photographer, and founder of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. CCLaP has been an unique kind of cyber-center for the small press since 2007, offering a number of amenities to the literary community of Chicago and beyond. CCLaP is a publisher of e-books by emerging authors; a blogger of book reviews, movie reviews, and essays; a creator of podcasts with authors a few times each month; and a host of Chicago reading events. They have published four e-books thus far: Life After Sleep by Mark Brand, Salt Creek Anthology by Jason Fisk, 99 Problems by Ben Tanzer, and Too Young to Fall Asleep by Sally Weigel. In honor of the upcoming fourth anniversary book party (August 10th at Chicago's Beauty Bar), the books are now available as hand-bound editions as well, something Jason calls "Hypermodern Editions."

As the Center's anniversary approached, Jason answered some questions for me on building a readership, the state of the book review, and the Chicago lit scene.

What led you to start CCLaP?

I was a working author myself for about ten years in Chicago, then back in Missouri was a working photographer for around five years previous to that; and coming from the punk/zine community of the 1980s when I was a teen, I've been doing fun little DIY creative projects for a long before either of those. So when I first entered middle age in the mid-2000s, and started becoming more and more dissatisfied with trying to continue pursuing a career as a creative writer, something like CCLaP was just naturally one of the first things that popped into my mind as something to do next with my life. Although truthfully, I came very close to opening an internet startup company instead (that's what a lot of my day jobs in Chicago have involved), in which case CCLaP wouldn't actually exist right now.

How has the reception been for the e-books you’ve published so far? I’m not trying to single out your authors, but more to ask how you reached out and found an audience, and what you learned about how to find your readers in between Book #1 and Book #4.

When I talk to my friends who run more traditional basement presses about this subject, it looks pretty certain that in general terms, CCLaP is generating the same amount of paying customers from the ebooks as they are from their paper books, which as most people know is nothing to sneeze at but no great shakes either. The nice thing, though, is that since the ebooks are released under a "pay what you want" scheme, it means that our paying customers only make up around 25 percent of the book's total readership; and so if you're talking just about how many eyeballs the center's books are getting in front of, you can think of it in general terms of about three to four times the amount of a typical basement press. The biggest lesson I've learned so far about gathering an audience is that this stuff really does fall along traditional age lines to a great extent; so that is, whenever I publish a middle-aged author with a middle-aged audience, downloads of the electronic version are always smaller than a title by a twentysomething with a college-aged audience, even when that book will often generate the same amount of press and interest away from the internet. The adoption of ebooks is truly a generational issue, I'm slowly learning.

What do you look for in a writer you’re deciding to publish?

Oh, it's a whole complicated host of factors, actually. Obviously the first and main issue is simply the quality of the actual manuscript; but then whether or not they're in Chicago comes into play as well, since that's so much more a convenient option for things like getting them to sign books, etc. And since part of CCLaP's mission as a more general overall arts organization is to help nurture artists over the course of their careers, part of what I look at when examining submissions is where that author is in their career, and how much a CCLaP book would be able to help with the long-term picture; so if someone like Ben Tanzer comes to me, for example, who now has a number of successful commercial novels under his belt, but is sitting on something more experimental or personal that will make his audience think of him in a new way if someone were to publish it, that counts for extra in my mind when making decisions about what to put out.

I think it’s great that you’re making handmade books out of CCLaP e-book releases. Will you continue to do this, or do you think it’s more of a special event for the 4-year anniversary?

The paper versions of CCLaP's books have actually always been a part of the plan, since starting up the publishing program in 2008; it's just that it's only now that I've actually been able to afford it. In general I'm trying to take my cues off how many musicians now do things, which is to entirely skip the middle step of distribution altogether; so in my case, the plan has always been to release an electronic version that people can download for free if they want, and a handmade, hardback paper version that costs a little more than a paper version normally would, and that can be directly purchased at the website much like how an Etsy store works, and then just skip the trade paperback version and the bookstores and Amazon and the traditional distributors altogether. It's my opinion that this is where most small presses are bleeding the most money these days, so my hope is to keep costs under control by simply eliminating this option entirely.

I’m so glad you’re running frequent book reviews on your blog. In a time when newspapers are downsizing their book review sections and laying off reviewers, can you speak to the importance of book reviews in our culture?

Well, I'm just amazed that more people don't do the same thing! I think that blogs got saddled at the beginning of their existence with this bad reputation, as if they were some form of literary genre unto themselves and with their own artistic pluses and minuses; but really, a blog is actually just more a type of technology, a specific kind of medium for delivering whatever you want, good or bad, just like it would be ridiculous to say that a piece of content is somehow artistically better when read on a piece of ivory-colored paper versus cream-colored paper. In this sense, then, a blog is nothing more than a giant unending sheet of paper that's given to you completely for free, and so makes it the best medium in human history for long-form, thoughtful essays. I think once we get to the next generation of online users, the ones who don't automatically equate blogs with unthinking idiocy, we're going to see a flowering again of long-form critical thought that could scarcely be imagined by previous generations.

Do book reviews become even more important in a moment of so many publishers, underground publishers, self-publishers, and varied formats? Do book reviewers help hold The Book together as hyperlinks and e-readers try to morph it?

That's a good question, and I confess one I've never really contemplated before. Certainly you paint a vivid mental picture of "artistic thought" being some kind of runny goo, and that different conventions like "novels" and "feature films" are differently shaped boxes that we put around this goo to try to contain and shape it, so that we can then put two of them side-by-side and compare them. Does our society need this in order to even understand the arts, and for it to be of any practical help in our day-to-day lives? And is it important for critics to continue holding up the "novel-shaped" box, when things like narrative videogames and hyperlinked stories create little holes in the corners for that goo to ooze out? I think those are more philosophical questions than practical ones, and probably better debated at dinner parties after a few drinks than a declarative answer given here.

If the big newspapers were considered reliable sources who often had the last or loudest word on book reviews, what should a reader look for in seeking trustworthy reviews in the blogosphere? Is the dismantling of the newspaper reviews a good thing or a bad thing for the small press?

Deciding which critics to trust has always boiled down to some simple criteria in my opinion, and I'm always surprised that so many people have a hard time with this, which is merely trust plus time. Too many people, I think, have this attitude towards critical thought that's similar to God speaking to His minions, that it's this booming random opinion coming in out of nowhere that we should blindly trust merely because someone in a position of authority is telling us to; but finding a good critic is actually much more similar to paying attention to the opinions to a good friend, in that the entire reason we even trust what they're saying is because they've proven over and over again that they CAN be trusted, precisely because they have very similar opinions to our own. That's always the best way to get good recommendations, I've found, is simply to find people whose tastes closely match your own, then pay attention anytime they rave about something you've never heard about, or argue for a project that you may have not cared for at first.

I think a big part of the problem occurred during the big Hollywood boom of the 1980s, when newspapers suddenly found themselves with an opportunity to sell many more pages of movie ads if they simply had an excuse to actually print those pages; that forced every newspaper in the country to hire their own staff of reviewers, who were basically no more than an excuse to even have a pullout movie section every Friday and sell a thousand percent more ads than they were before. That's when you really saw the first big proliferation of this "From God's Mouth" attitude about criticism, where critics became an endless series of faceless anonymous shills, and the only reason you would put stock in any of their opinions is because this big expensive newspaper was telling you to; and then when this became a successful paradigm, it of course bled over into things like book reviews as well. So in that sense, the dismantling of the newspaper review system is the best thing that could've happened to both readers and small presses; because what's rising in its wake is both the much more reliable crowd-sourcing process at places like Amazon (which, let's face it, is a HIGHLY trustworthy way of learning simply about any particular book's general strengths and weaknesses), combined with long-form critics like myself who take our cues off the old masters like Pauline Kael, who people trust in the same way they trust their friends, and who can recommend unknown things in a way that Amazon crowd-sourcing never could, no matter how sophisticated their algorithms get.

What have you learned about small press publishing since setting up shop in 2007?

Oh, dear, we could be here all day if I started to answer this, so perhaps I'll just skip this question altogether. The short answer is that I've learned hundreds of things, and that the very best advice I can give a person who's interested in the subject is to simply go out and start a small press themselves, to learn all the hard lessons they never will simply by reading about other people's experiences.

Chicago has a thriving small press scene: From afar, I know about Quimby’s, the Orange Alert Reading Series, the Chicago Underground Library, Another Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Zine Fest, the “Quickies” Reading Series, MAKE, Featherproof Books. Have you paired up with any of these folks in your events or in other ways?

I have yet to formally partner with any of these groups, but you could absolutely say that an informal network of support exists here in Chicago within this community: we all tend to go to each other's events, buy each other's books, provide publicity for each other's big things, recommend artists to each other, send submitting authors each other's ways, etc. In fact, back when I quit writing myself in 2004 and was first coming up with the idea for CCLaP, this is one of the main reasons I decided to follow through with the particular plan I did, was knowing what a strong and longstanding literary community there actually is here in Chicago, which now that I've traveled a bit I can confidently state as one of the largest and most tight-knit ones in the world.

What’s on the horizon for CCLaP?

Well, more books for a start -- another three before this year is through, then another five in 2012. And more live events, more podcast episodes, and the same 150 book reviews at the blog next year as I publish every year. Plus it's looking likely that we'll finally be offering our first classes and workshops next year as well; because I have to say, the requests never stop coming in from people wanting to learn how to make the kind of handmade books I do for CCLaP, so I'm thinking strongly of just charging a fee and teaching the people who really do want to sit down and learn. Then of course the center has a long-term vision as well, for those who don't know; everything being done right now, for example, is in service of hopefully one day finally opening a permanent physical space somewhere here in the city, at which point CCLaP will morph more into the traditional community center that I've always envisioned it as.

*****

Find the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography online here.

Under the Volcano Books Opens October 15th, Mexico City

2011-08-02T05:58:00.000-07:00

Grant Cogswell hanging shelves at Under the Volcano Books, July 2011.

The last time I saw Grant Cogswell, he was making me laugh hysterically in Austin, Texas. Seventeen years and a few cities later, this filmwriter/ activist/ longtime Seattle resident is gearing up to open an expat English-language bookstore and gathering place in the Roma District of Mexico City (D.F.). The store will be named Under the Volcano Books after the Mexico-set novel by expat writer Malcolm Lowry. The grand opening is set for Saturday October 15th, 2011.

Yesterday Grant was kind enough to answer some interview questions in between constructing a bookstore interior at Cerrada Chiapas 40-C, Colonia Roma Norte.

What led you to want to open a bookstore? Was this a life-long dream, or did it have more to do with timing and opportunity?

Not a lifelong dream. I'd worked in bookstores stateside, and it never really occurred to me until I came to D.F. and saw there wasn't really anything for readers of English - and began to imagine what was also missing, which was the kind of semi-public community that might grow around such an institution. After I decided to move here in 2006, my imagination of what kind of life I wanted here just kind of grew the store within itself, like a pearl, becoming the center of the impulse. By the time I was here full-time in late 2009 it was what I was doing.

I understand that you have a particular vision for this English-language bookstore in a world-class city, in a neighborhood with a long history of artists and expats. Knowing you, it will be much more than just a store. Tell us what you hope for the bookstore to be, and what steps you will take to see that vision through?

Well, I think it will be a place of a very particular kind. I'm very insistent that there won't be wi-fi available, even when we have coffee and tables and who knows maybe even some kind of food. There's a kind of psychic silence that to me is very much associated with reading - I think a lot of people go camping to find it, or hell, I don't know, have sex with strangers-- so that's the first thing: analog. I'll often be playing Coltrane, or The Band, or KEXP (ironically) online - there's also an amazing station here at 105.7 that has its finger on the pulse of whateveryouwanttocallit Indie rock from the US just as firmly as anything on the internet. Our location is at the end of an alley in a hundred-year-old working neighborhood, but we have this lovely little tiled back garden. I'd like it to be a place that a large assemblage of travellers and residents and even people in the English-speaking world who'll never go to Mexico recognize as an outpost of, I don't know, the examined life? That sounds so hard. The life of books, thought, self-education, art. Once my Spanish is good enough to read at a decent enough speed for literature (I can get through the newspaper fairly quick, but am constantly resorting to a dictionary) I just have to make sure I don't end up spending my off hours hanging out at El Pendulo or Conejo Blanco. I love those places. We could do a lot worse than just be an English version of them. There will at some point be a literary journal based in the store called Mexico Review focusing on translations from contemporary Mexican writers and Americans writing about Mexico, in the very most expansive sense. We'll be open every day, because a 24-hour-layover on a NY-Buenos Aires flight happens at its own convenience, and I am counting on those people coming to the store.

What kind of books will you feature?

Used contemporary and classic fiction and poetry, translations from the Spanish, politics, history, philosophy, urban planning and architecture, lit crit, interesting nonfiction, art books, punk culture, comics, travel books, language aids, 'expat lit'.

Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio recently read in the space that will be Under the Volcano Books. Do you plan to hold readings frequently? What types of writers will you court? From how far away?

I'll have visiting writers, obviously drawing for reasons of airfare and my personal connections far heavier from the West Coast of the US than the East. But a lot of people come through here. Not too often - I want to maintain the sense of them as an event, and the bar will be high, nobody without a published book at the very least. I can't see flying anyone over from Australia, but otherwise the sky's the limit.

What has been the most challenging aspect of opening the bookstore so far? What has been the most unexpected challenge?

Finding a space; finding a space. By custom here you need to have a property-owner guarantee your lease when you rent, and that goes for residential as well as commercial property. Arriving here as an immigrant without particularly deep local roots this was looking almost impossible - years off. Then my good friend and roommate bought a house in Roma Norte for his recording business and it was kind of the Hand of God.

You’re opening a brick and mortar bookstore in 2011. You’ve been blogging about the store, keeping far-flung friends updated on Facebook, and you’ve created a catalog of your store’s inventory on LibraryThing. How do you see the relationship between your bookstore and the digital world? Are you interested in selling books online, or just getting people into your space?

I'm going to do what I enjoy: I think going outside of that would be to the detriment of my pleasure in the store and thereby bring it down. There are people who want to see this become an emporium for the materials they use in their English classes here: that's not going to happen, nor am I going to become an online dealer. My skills are choosing the inventory very carefully based on a knowledge of the literature of the English language and contemporary culture, and curating a place for people to come to in a splendidly comfortable and affordable neighborhood. I will also make coffee.

One plan you had was to sell books on the street while waiting to find the right space for the store. Have you done much of that? How have sales been? Have you liked the feeling of selling literature on the streets of Mexico City?

I haven't sold anything on the streets. I soon found out those street markets are a web of old relationships and there's a reason you don't see foreigners working in them. I was about to get a permit from the Delegacion to sell in Coyoacan when Sylvain bought the house where the store will go and it just wasn't worth doing at that point.

I’ve been noticing a new business model among bookstores being opened by working artists and writers: The kind of bookstore that is not required to sustain itself. The owners’ income/s from art and writing jobs help to supplement the bookstore, which they choose to open because they passionately want a bookstore in their city. Will Under the Volcano Books be required to sustain itself?

Yes, but there are lots of ways we can make that happen if things get tight. I see the store over time becoming a magnet for people who want to practice their English. If there's a store full of people four nights a week at 50 pesos a head chatting away because that's what's needed to keep us afloat, that's perfectly fine with me. I think our overhead is a fraction of what it would be in the US. You see a lot of places here you wonder, how the hell does that store stay open? Things are just a lot cheaper in general here is how, and I am counting on them staying that way. I can't imagine the brass it would take to do this in the States, and don't want to.

On a Youtube video that seems to have vanished since I saw it, you made a very provocative statement that you hoped the bookstore would introduce both Mexicans and Americans the better sides of themselves to each other. That [currently] Mexicans know too much American scorn and Americans hear too much about Mexican crime. Tell us more about your hope and how literature sheds light on our better angels.

Well, most Americans simply have hardly the faintest idea about this country: what it contains, what its 'normal setting' is, the daily life of the majority of people. Now that the drug killings have reached around 50,000, people throw around the statistic that the narco wars have killed as many people as Americans died in Vietnam, so people think there is a war going on here. (There is in some places near the US border, specifically Ciudad Juarez, and in some of rural Tamaulipas where it could be classified at that level.) Well, that's true. But two million Vietnamese died in that war. Nothing like the same scale. Don't get me wrong, the situation is an enormous and terrible tragedy and I think most people here believe we have further to go with it than we have come yet, and who knows what it will lead to. But this is a nation of 100 million people most of whom have no connection with or direct experience of any of that world. And their lives go on, day to day. Americans sense not the least texture of that reality for the most part, or the nature of life here in DF, which is now one of the safest places in the country and a magnet again for that reason. Nor the particular and complex past and the nature of the national identity it produced, which I think may be a healthier approach to being of the New World than I have seen come to fruition in the U.S.

On the other side, American mass-culture floods the airwaves and the video stalls here, and it is usually the movies and music with the most money behind them, which are not always the worst, but very often. I've run into smart, worldly people here who were totally unaware the US has a culture of art cinema, for example. Mexicans in general are not big readers - which is okay for me, because Mexicans in general are not my target audience. But I'd like to at least get the very privileged cultural class here to be aware of Whitman, of Keats, or Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf. I think there's room to create that awareness, and a hunger for it, because contact with American culture is seen from the very least on an economic plane as sophistication, as self-development. And I'm sitting here with the literary aspect being almost entirely absent from that conversation wanting to lean over and say "There's something pretty wide here you missed..."

Visit the Under the Volcano Books website here.

Meet the Author at the Bus Station: Or, How to Book an Affordable Zine Tour in Tight Times

2011-07-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

Zines on wheels: The Fly Away Zine Mobile toured through Pittsburgh in July 2011.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the rise of author signings in airport bookstores ("Meet the Author at the Airport"). I loved this image of an author touring without even leaving the transportation hubs, and having a roster of signings dedicated to travelers.

But airport bookstores are unlikely to cater to small press readings any time soon. Likewise, many small and micro press writers would be financially deterred from touring by airplane. For writers from our side of the tracks we have discount buslines, those new web-booked, low-overhead, curbside, wifi-equipped, post-Chinatown bus lines like Megabus and Bolt Bus that cost riders as little as $1 per trip. A few weeks ago, I interviewed zinester Ocean about her August 2011 zine tour via Megabus, the "High on Unemployment Tour."

The tour name refers to both her current unemployment checks (her government job shuts down in the summer) and her current zine series, "High on Burning Photographs." Ocean's storytelling is intense, compelling, and intensely personal, as she offers hilarious, poignant, inspiring, or heart-wrenching dispatches from one young woman's "aging riot grrrl" life. Ocean's life as written has been full of adventure, full of tight friendships with vibrant and fearless friends, and full of astute reflections and complex observations from quieter seasons. Her scope is deep and wide, reporting stories from her kitchen table at 3:00am, from her local laundromat, from penpal conversations with prisoners, or from the landscape of young, queer America. Lucky for her readers, she's been recording her stories in xeroxed zines since 1996, when she was a young teenager.

Ocean originally hails from New York, but now lives and writes in Pittsburgh. Conveniently for her, Pittsburgh was recently made a Megabus hub connecting numerous points on the East Coast and the Midwest. On tour, she'll be concentrating on the cities of the Midwest, and she's excited to get to know that part of the country, with which she's not very familiar. Not all dates are set in stone yet, but she has plans to read in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago (another Megabus hub), Madison, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Columbus is a maybe and she'll do a last reading back in New York.

Ocean is already a seasoned veteran of bus trips. "In most ways, I don't miss Greyhound, but with Greyhound, you know you'll always have a story," she mused as we talked in Pittsburgh's Lili Coffee Shop. Instead of heading to college, when she graduated from high school, she bought a three-month Discovery Pass on Greyhound. "There were the fights, the drunk people (who somehow manage to get past the strict no-drinking rules of Greyhound), and then there was the guy who asked me to marry him. We were just talking, and he said, 'Let's get married and go to LA.' We weren't even riding in the direction of LA." In those days, Ocean had a "Greyhound outfit" consisting of a silver tank top and a '50s style skirt patterned with pigs and clover. The idea was to dress "the kind of outlandish so that good people would approach me and bad people would stay away."

Ocean's also done her share of rides on the Chinatown bus: "They drive so fast, I always think I'm going to die." Similarly, a recent overnight bus ride between Warsaw and Lithuania was frightening for its high speeds. "I took a sleeping pill but I was too anxious to ever fall asleep." In contrast, Ocean calls Megabus "the sane bus." She loves riding in the top level for its views, even knowing about "the accident."

I was curious which method Ocean had used for finding reading venues in unfamiliar cities. "Sometimes I relied on word of mouth from friends, and other times I just typed the city's name and the word ZINE into Google to see what came up. It worked!" Though Google has been a helpful pointer, she still prefers to pick up the phone to book a venue. The process has been mostly gratifying: "Sometimes when I get in touch with people about an event, I find out they're already readers of my zine."

TOUR STOPS

In Cleveland, Ocean will read (August 6th) at the longstanding literary bookstore, Mac's Backs, which has been open in Ohio since 1978, and in its current Cleveland Heights location since 1982. In Chicago, where she'll join up with a few zinester friends, Ocean plans to read at the quintessential DIY bookstore, Quimby's. Her Minneapolis venue is zine-friendly Boneshaker Books, and in Detroit she's excited to read at the anarchy space, the Trumbullplex, in conjunction with their new zine library. In Milwaukee she's hooking up with QZAP (Queer Zine Archive Project), in Madison she hopes to hit the Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, and she'll wrap up with a reading at Bluestockings Bookstore in downtown Manhattan around late August or early September. For this last reading Ocean will pair up with the For the Birds feminist collective.

As for accommodations on a budget, Ocean's hoping to crash with her fellow readers in most cities, but when that doesn't work, she'll rely on her membership at Couchsurfing.org or look up local hostels.

The young writer seemed excited about getting on the road to meet and greet the zine community. She talked about missing this aspect of the zine experience from her early days. "When I first got into zines, most people who read my zines would write me a letter back. That was normal--I guess before the internet we [zine writers] were all stranded in random places, desperate to find people we could relate to. Now I think I hear from about 10% of my readers. Even the zine ordering process is not as personal as it once was. Now we have these great distros, but back in the day, every zine had a zine review section. They gave the address and said 'send $1.'" These days Ocean usually skips the distros and sticks with mailing and handing out her zines to friends or longtime followers.

To get the latest issue of "High on Burning Photographs," send $1 or two stamps to:

Ocean
PO Box 40144
Pittsburgh, PA 15201

Stay tuned for a full list of tour dates and venues for Ocean's High on Unemployment Tour.

More Bookstore Briefs: Good News, Plus an Elegy

2011-07-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

NYC's Word Up pop up bookstore has extended its run through the end of September! (via Word Up website)

DC's Busboys and Poets expanded to a fourth location (in Hyattsville, Md.) this week (via WSET)

Rebel Bookseller panel happens this Friday at Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore (The book's subtitle: Why Indie Businesses Represent Everything You Want to Fight For, From Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities)
(see the Facebook event page)

Pittsburgh's Big Idea bookstore will move to the avenue and gain a cafe and event space (via Big Idea website)

Book rep Ann Kingman asks whether bookmobiles can be the new food trucks? (via Twitter)

And book critic Scott McLemee has published a thoughtful essay, "The Bookstore at the End of the World": "The algorithms at Amazon are no match for an intelligent person behind the cash register." (via Inside Higher Education)

Bookstore Briefs: The Bad News and the Good

2011-07-19T05:19:00.001-07:00

East Liberty, Pittsburgh. Photo by Jamie Phillips, July 2011.

Borders Books is going out of business, 40 years after two brothers opened one small bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As the Detroit Free Press reports, liquidation sales could begin as early as Friday. A chain-wide closure will mean the loss of 400 stores and almost 11,000 jobs.

In other big news, Amazon will start renting e-textbooks via Kindle as soon as the Fall of 2011, an announcement that will affect university bookstores across the nation. Gabe Habash tells us how this will be bad for the bookstores, textbook publishers, and authors, but good for the students.

In good news, Greenlight Bookstore (a retail store in Fort Greene, Brooklyn) will expand its space and add a coffee bar by partnering with a local business. Greenlight opened in 2009.

Maple Street Book Shop in New Orleans will also expand, opening two new locations in the city, one in Faubourg St. John and another in Faubourg Marigny. Read more at the Gambit. Maple Street sells books both new and used & rare, and opened as a paperback bookstore in 1964.

I recently went back to Charlottesville, Virginia for the first time in 14 years. I was thrilled to find that Heartwood Books was still alive, still a stellar second-hand bookstore, and at least one familiar (unforgettable) face was still behind the counter. I especially enjoyed the Books On Books section.

Heartwood Books on Elliwood Avenue in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Book Review: BAD BAD BAD by Jesús Ángel García

2011-07-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

Jesús Ángel García, badbadbad. Colorado: New Pulp Press, 2011. Fiction. 237 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9828436-3-5.

Jesús Ángel García's debut novel, badbadbad, is lousy with exquisite contradictions. The protagonist, Jesús Ángel García, is a fallen angel with a Jesus complex, a lost man with a mission. The novel is a bildungsroman told by a young man who is already divorced with a child; or do I mean a coming-of-age in reverse, an "adult child" seeking his own lost innocence? If he's looking for his innocence, it's through sexcapades with kinky chicks on the social web, and though he's enjoying a lot of sex dates, sex toys, and other Triple-X adventures in the Bible Belt South, he mainly seeks out troubled women who might need his healing powers of love and listening. He attends church services every Sunday morning, but that's just for appearances: He's more excited about evening performances by the local punk band Children's Crusade, but he makes a living as the webmaster for the biggest evangelical congregation in town. By day he forms allegiances with his custody lawyer and the Reverend; by night he shares bourbon and MP3s with the Reverend's excommunicated son. The story's a pulp fiction narrated (from jail? from beyond the grave?) to a younger brother he abandoned long ago to an abusive family. The novel's almost a stroke book, but some of the sex scenes are decidedly unappetizing. And although the novelist uses his own name for his protagonist, I have no idea (as reader) whether the book is thinly-veiled autobiography, metaphor for lived experience, or pure fabrication using the device of truthful confession.

One of the most perfect chapters is one where descriptions of a gay pride rally and a KKK march are intertwined. Both events attract the same two camps, it's just a matter of who's marching in the center (each in their own brand of costumes) and who's holding the protest placards on the sidelines. Another choice chapter sees Jesús (aka JAG) take a trip with two of the "fallen angels" (the name of the underground hook-up website JAG frequents) to a huge Southern tent show featuring "guns, knives, and dolls." The scene has a carnival atmosphere, even as it takes place under the kind of tent that (on another day) might house a religious revival. The "dolls" featured at the show are bikini-clad babes who pass out lemonade to shoppers and set up targets for customers enjoying their new guns. The weapons are lit by halogen lights as if they were jewels. The air smells of fried dough. JAG observes the families who push their baby strollers from booth to booth, window-shopping like they're at a mall. His "alt" friends encourage him (against his preferences) to buy a gun, a plot point that makes the reader wonder how alternative these kids really are. They teach JAG how to shoot, how to handle his gun, while the sexual healer imagines his ex-wife as the target. Nearby, some men have brought their own targets: images of black civil rights leaders. In the background, the sound of endless American war marches on.

Over and over in badbadbad, the plot reveals hypocrisies and paints contradictions within characters or scenes that once seemed to be only black and white. Other times it draws parallels and similarities between camps that are supposed to be polar opposites. Weren't the bigoted Bible-thumpers being set up as the bad guys and the queer-fabulous music-lovers the good fellows? What about the third-wave feminist hotties who are unashamed to declare what they want, but push their self-love to the point of shallowness? Are we being robbed of a symbology we thought we understood, or is García (the author) simply righting and complicating perceptions that were far too simplistic when we started reading?

JAG's story is full of people. But as characters enter, entice, and evaporate, one character remains. This reveal sneaks up on the reader: JAG is a narrator who provides some reflection, a certain amount of internal commentary along the way. But often enough the story reads like we're following him as an enchanted observer in a forest of wacky Southern characters—some long familiar, others new to the scene. Eventually, after the reader passes through all the distractions of colorful 21st Century punks, ravers, earth mamas, bondage queens, and neo-goths; after we wade through the rabid religious homophobes, Klansmen, and right-to-lifers, the character of JAG himself emerges. He's surrounded by pals and booked with play-dates, but his loneliness is only growing. His pull towards the social web is compulsive, his need to shop for the next hook-up is constant, his separation from his son is never-ending, and his desire for connection remains dangerously starved. Like JAG's own sudden revelation that constant online contact and overlapping cyber-relationships have added up to nothing, all these compelling characters suddenly disappear from the plot like ciphers: We're dropped into a sudden awareness of a profound emptiness in JAG that's been gathering steam while we were paying attention to everything else--a void growing ever more hungry, angry, and violent under the surface.

Badbadbad draws on styles and themes from familiar stories and older literatures. The novel sustains the straight-talk trashiness of 20th Century pulp, the sex-romp identity games of Kathy Acker, and the dark inevitability of Giovanni's Room. But it considers an absolutely current societal malaise: the twin-headed hydra of selective isolation and social media addiction. In the process, badbadbad reveals a new brand of lust for life and a new kind of lost generation.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, literary fiction, small press fiction, emerging authors, neo-pulp fiction, fiction about the internet age, and Southern fiction.

*****

Find badbadbad on New Pulp Press here.

Find more about this "transmedia" novel (and the 32-city book tour) on the author's website here.

Briefs: Bookstores & Book Tours

2011-06-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

Word Up bookstore has opened! The Upper Manhattan pop-up bookstore and community space was welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd on Friday, June 17, and featured small press books in English, Spanish, Russian, and even Armenian. The grand opening got very nice write-ups in the Manhattan Times and the New York Times.

San Fran small press author Jesus Angel Garcia has embarked on a cross-country tour for his new 21st century pulp novel about sex, cyberspace, alterna-scenes, and evangelist religion in the Dirty South: badbadbad (New Pulp Press, 2011). His LA debut reading was held Friday, June 17 at Skylight Books, a great (indie-press friendly) bookstore in Los Feliz; his next reading date is in Austin on Wednesday, June 22. See his tour schedule (39 shows in 32 cities!) here. Read his first tour blog at Electric Literature here.

Under the Volcano Books will host its first reading this Friday, June 24 in Mexico City. The reading will be Matthew Stadler 's fourth stop on a 12-city "NAFTA Tour"--he'll read in Canada, US, and Mexico from his new book, Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha. Novelist Stadler is also former lit editor of Nest, and the publisher of Publication Studio, a new indie press (and innovative publishing model in the vein of OR Books and Cursor) that started (in one sense) with a binding machine obtained at a good price from Brooklyn's Vox Pop Bookstore (RIP). The reading event will be in the future location of Under the Volcano Books, an English-language bookstore set to open (once funding allows) in the Roma District of Mexico City. The reading starts at 7:00pm, location address is Cerrada Chiapas 40-C, Colonia Roma Norte. Find more event details on Facebook here. Read an interview about Publication Studio here. Read more on Under the Volcano Books here.

The Library of Reality

2011-06-14T04:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I overheard someone say, "This is an interesting time in history to teach in law school, since there are no jobs for these students when they graduate." Her friend replied, "Yes, well, I hear that there is a palpable awareness of that in the classrooms. The students are shaken."

So, why is there no equivalent in library school? The library job market has crashed, with public libraries gaining patrons but losing state revenue; academic libraries losing patrons to Googling undergrads; and many libraries downgrading formerly professional jobs to paraprofessional ones, or replacing MLS positions with IT personnel. Yet library schools continue to accept a flood tide of students--library schools are a cash cow for universities. I watched my own classes triple in size WHILE the economy was crashing. And meanwhile, there is no sense of reality on the campus, no one telling these students that library jobs are sparse and when one opens, a glut of overqualified applicants will apply. Or that most academic library jobs opening up were two or three people's jobs a year or two ago. Or that many retiring librarians are not replaced, or not replaced right away. Or that too many graduates who are volunteering at their local library or otherwise beefing their resume are no closer to a paying full-time job than they were when they graduated two years ago. The MLS continues to be marketed as a "flexible degree."

To my knowledge, no one has written a high profile article to reverse the enthusiasm that "A Hipper Crowd of Shushers" created in 2007 (New York Times, July 8).

The Business of Micro Press

2011-06-12T06:54:00.000-07:00

Art Noose sells her writing at PIX: Pittsburgh Indy Comics Expo (October 2010).

As a publisher, I am currently seeking viable options for funding future titles on my very-very-small press. Here are the primary options for funding small press projects, as I see it:

1. Out of pocket funding. Fine if you have it (especially if you have it over and above your monthly expenses). Obviously, sometimes very small runs on micro press operations don't have to set you back much--say, $300, or maybe $100 or less. That could be a good run of a zine, or a short run of a chapbook or xeroxed novella, or a POD book, etc. However, I believe that a not-insignificant portion of my credit card debt is made up of such "lo-fi" ventures.

2. Collective out of pocket funding. I have known small presses that were literary collectives, and I assume (though I'm not positive), that some of their (early?) books were funded by everyone chipping in. Still, this theory breaks down, because everyone in the collective eventually wants to do a book of their own, so that really points back to similar expenses of a one-person small press.

3. The pre-order. Recently a friend had a poetry book coming out on a respectable small press, and he wrote to all his friends saying that the book wasn't going to happen until X amount of people ordered it. The order fee was higher than the normal price of the book, but it included a deluxe package of a signed poetry book and an extensive sound recording by the author and a collaborator. The pre-order might be a pretty solid option, but someone involved (either the author or the publisher) has to have a lot of loyal friends, or have made a name for themselves. This method is not necessarily recommended for totally unknowns.

4. The grant. Need I say much more here? Grant money is very handy if you can get it, and I believe that after you've gotten one grant, that greases the wheels for future grants. But if you're not in the grant habit or the grant circuit, it can be a long road: learning how to write a great-looking proposal, researching appropriate grant opportunities, figuring out how to become eligible for a grant (ie 501c status, etc.), waiting and hoping to get a grant. I also know several small presses and authors who don't believe in grants, who think of them as shady tax loopholes where people with money can get more money. The grant option is not for everyone.

5. Subscriptions. I am thinking of one micro-press that publishes quarterly runs of his mini-poetry journal. This journal has a decent subscription base, and in any case the prices seem to be geared to cover the cost of printing (which he does on a good black & white printer out of his home) and postage, but not much more. This seems like an utterly sane equation to me. The poetry journal in question is a labor of love, yet it basically covers its own costs. Over the years, the journal has gained a loyal audience, but it is almost exclusively distributed through the mail; the publisher does not have to deal with other types of distribution; and if he chooses, he can gear his print runs to the number of subscribers.

I think that one question I am posing in this blog post is, In an age of such widespread debt, how long is it before a Labor of Love is no longer loveable?

6. Sales revenue. Whether a book, zine, or other small press project proves to sell as much as it cost to create is still a crapshoot in my experience. The cost of getting a book noticed by and sold to people who will read it is counted not only in material or printing fees, but also in time. We may not pay for advertisements--we of the small press, we of the savvy social media age. But bothering to put out a small press book means bothering to spend massive amounts of time promoting the book on Facebook, posting on blogs, talking it up to reviewers, finding the right distros, making fliers, dropping books off at bookstores, and of course arranging or doing readings. One of the best ways to promote your book is by doing lots of readings, preferably around the country.

In other words, the small press might ask for your whole life: Make sure it's something you enjoy doing. (Small press might be a verb disguised as a noun.)

7. The fundraiser. Hosting a reading with a door fee (at a venue willing to keep their own fee low) comes to mind, but I don't actually know that many presses who have used this method besides:

7a. Kickstarter. Kickstarter, the internet fundraiser site, has some great potential for very small and micro presses. I have seen authors and presses use Kickstarter as a pre-order vehicle, as a publicity vehicle, and as a flat-out donation vehicle. Check out one successful literary project here and one still-fundraising graphic novel project here. You can browse their Writing and Publishing category here.

8. Patrons. Do they exist anymore? Are they common? Are some small presses funded by parents and families of the publisher? And, more importantly, when patronage is involved, is it ever disclosed? For some reason, I feel that the transparency of how the small press is funded is crucial to creating a fertile soil for the free press. Can the greatest number of people get their words, views, and work into the public sphere if the Haves are hoarding and protecting knowledge of the financial side of publishing from the Have Nots? The small press world is still overwhelmingly white and very college educated. Surely this is not because we have that much more to say than other Americans, or because our stories are so much more valuable. The means of production must be transparent, and hopefully made widely accessible as well.

I also feel that we need the freedom to contradict, critique, annoy, and piss off the generations that came before us (if need be), and patronage in publishing could stand, explicitly or subconsciously, as a hinderance to frankness of literary content.

*****

I'm not trying to make the small press all about the bottom line. The small press is not about money. Life in America IS about money, and we get involved in the arts to retain some of our humanity. But, life in America is about money. The cost of living is constantly going up, up, up, while wages are not keeping pace. And if we're always spending more than we earn back on the small press projects we produce, we're going to burn out. I want us to be sustainable.

How do YOU fund your micro press endeavors? What's your perspective on the subject of money and the small press?

If any small press, lit mag, or micro press publishers are reading this and are willing to share their thoughts or experiences on financing literary endeavors, please speak up.

WORD UP Community Bookshop to Grace Upper Manhattan for One Month

2011-06-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

Two titles from Fractious Press as spotted on the shelves at Fleeting Pages bookstore (Pittsburgh, May 2011).

Fleeting Pages pop-up bookstore closed its Pittsburgh doors at 9:00pm on June 4th. But close on its heels, small press publisher Veronica Liu, pairing up with the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA) and Vantage Properties, will be opening a Manhattan pop-up on June 14th. The new bookstore will be called Word Up, in reference to its uptown location of Washington Heights. Much like Fleeting Pages, Word Up will pop up for one month, and will be dedicated to the output (and reading/writing events) of the small press, the micro press, and self publishers of zines. The store will aim also to showcase a multi-lingual selection of books, to reflect the residents of this diverse neighborhood especially known for its large Dominican population. Inventory and events will focus largely, but not exclusively, on metro New York presses and writers.

Liu, who is managing editor of Seven Stories Press by day, and moonlights as publisher of Fractious Press by night, has been active in the micro press scene for several years. After attending zine fests and other small press fairs with a table full of Fractious wares, and hosting readings to promote the press' subversive and engaging authors, a pop-up bookstore may seem like a logical extension of such events.

But two projects through Seven Stories led equally to the idea of placing a bookstore in Washington Heights. Liu has been working with the Seven Stories Institute (affiliated with the Press, although a separate entity), which acts as a democratic disseminator of Seven Stories books and ideas. Recognizing that their radical, critical nonfiction was being distributed more widely in academic circles than in the communities such books were written to serve, Seven Stories Institute was founded in 2004 to devise ways to reach those underserved populations--whether by offering the books in Spanish, making the books available at a deep discount, or organizing community discussions. (Read more here.) In addition, Liu has been editing a forthcoming book, REBEL BOOKSELLER: Why Indie Businesses Represent Everything You Want To Fight for, from Free Speech To Buying Local To Building Communities (written by veteran bookseller Andrew Laties). Due out from Seven Stories in its second edition in July, the book (originally published by Vox Pop in 2005) has been considered a must-read among certain circles of radical and community-minded booksellers.

NoMAA and Vantage Properties have been enthusiastic partners with Liu in making the Word Up project a reality. The assisting realtor from Vantage has been excited at the prospect of both filling an unused space and seeing a bookstore come to Washington Heights. Liu says that the realtor grew up in the neighborhood and can't recall a single bookstore in the immediate area, although nearby Inwood and Harlem/Sugar Hill have had bookstores. Details for the final location of Word Up are still being worked out, but Liu has one back up location "ready to go" should her first-choice storefront fall through. The exact location will be announced later this week. [See UPDATE below.] Though utilities such as electricity and internet will create costs, the overall overhead of the project is expected to be low.

The bookstore will open during NoMAA's Uptown Arts Stroll (aka Paseo de las Artes), an annual festival featuring a month of artist exhibits, dance performances, readings, and other creative events. At this writing, Word Up store hours are set for weekdays 4:00pm-9:00pm, and weekends Noon-4:00pm, with some added hours for events. Currently, Liu is collecting the shop's inventory, which will be sold on consignment. Interested small press publishers and authors should contact her at info@fractiouspress.com to receive a consignment form and shipping address, or to propose a small press reading, workshop, or event.

Find a Facebook event page for Word Up here:
https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=217256871630959

See the Fractious Press events page for an update on the location: http://www.fractiouspress.com/events

Find the new Word Up website here:
http://wordupbooks.wordpress.com/

...or stay tuned to this blog for additional info.

UPDATE: Veronica Liu has confirmed the bookstore address as 4157 Broadway @ W. 175 Street (a former pharmacy).

SECOND UPDATE: This article has been edited for accuracy since its original version.

A New Kind of Book Blog

2011-06-02T09:48:00.000-07:00

Juliet Cook reads with the TypewriterGirls Poetry Cabaret (downtown Pittsburgh), June 25, 2010

Continued thoughts from yesterday's post on small press reading series: What if a city's lit scene hosted a book blog specifically dedicated to reviewing the books of authors coming into town for upcoming readings?

Let me back up. There's two factors that lead me to this idea:

1.) Yesterday I wrote some do's and don'ts of running (or participating in) a reading. I talked about some things that reading series hosts can do to maximize the positive experience of visiting writers (see #2 on this list). Since we can try our best to cultivate a growing audience for our reading series, but can't ultimately control how many people show up or what event is competing with the reading that particular night, I talked about other things we can do to ensure that the out-of-town author gets to meet other cool writers, or gets publicity or feedback for their new book. I mean, you don't want there to be an unusually low turnout that night and then have a dud audience be the visiting writer's entire memory of both your city and your reading series, right?

2.) I am currently engaged in booking readings and hustling reviews for an author I just published. I'm really excited about the book, but it's the poet's debut collection and no one's heard of him. Every pitch I make is an uphill battle, a competition for someone's time, a bookstore's shelf space, a reading series' slots, and the dwindling column inches dedicated to newspapers' book reviews. After booking the author a reading in Baltimore, I wrote to one colleague in that city to ask for suggestions of local reviewers and book bloggers. He wrote me back with a list of people to try, but gave a familiar warning: Most book reviewers are backed up on such requests.

We've all been reading, of course, about book review sections getting cut or drastically reduced from newspapers and magazines. But even with all the talk about print books turning into e-books, and bookstores large and small having serious struggles, the fact remains that more titles are being published each year. So the demand for book reviews should being rising, not diminishing.

So, I'm proposing the following in my current city of Pittsburgh, and suggesting that other cities consider such a model:

A book blog that would be dedicated to publicizing upcoming readings, especially to reviewing the new books by out-of-town authors slated to read in Pittsburgh soon. So that no one person would be taxed for time, I would be interested in setting up such a blog only after I gathered a critical mass of volunteers. Say, 15 or 20 people whom I thought were solid reviewers, who could be called on to review the next writer, with a rotation insuring that no one had to write a review too often. These reviews would be unpaid, which is too bad. Traditionally, newspapers and magazines have paid for book reviews, and I hate to replace a paid writing gig with an unpaid one. Frankly, I think the amount of unpaid work that goes into the small press is a bit shameful. Sure, we love what we do, but it does take enormous amounts of time and labor, and meanwhile, the rent marches on. If anyone has a suggestion of how to generate a fund to pay reviewers even a token amount, please use the comment section.

Further, the reviews would be positive. The idea would be to generate an audience for writers coming to town, so the reviewers should answer the question (among others): Who would like this book? Who is the intended audience for this book? If the reviewer didn't like the assigned book, s/he would have the option to interview the writer instead, or to not review the book. I wouldn't advocate lying or turning into a sycophant just for the blog, but rather trying to generate an audience and letting the audience decide for themselves what they thought of the writer. (Some writers, of course, give a great show but read very differently on the page.)

When time allowed, interviews could run in addition to reviews. Authors would be asked for JPEGs of their book covers and author photos.

Would local authors be reviewed or interviewed? Maybe. I don't mean to prioritize out-of-town authors over Pittsburgh writers, but I would want to avoid reviewers hyping their friends, over-taxing the volunteer reviewers, constant requests from local writers, and the inevitable scenario of disappointing people often. It might be best to just leave out all those scenarios by confining the blog to reviewing writers coming from outside of Pittsburgh. Or, perhaps a compromise could be running interviews with local writers, with questions asked by other local writers.

I think that interaction and dialogue between writers from different cities is crucial to the health of any one city's literary scene: Scenes that get too provincial, without new blood or fresh air, are in danger of becoming stagnant. A blog like this could add to such a dialogue. Maybe in a perfect scenario, Pittsburgh writers could be reviewed or interviewed by out-of-town writers instead of local-on-local. But that aspect would involve a significant addition of work and organization, so it might be better to start with a more simple formula.

What do you think?

Some Thoughts on Small Press Readings

2011-06-01T09:17:00.000-07:00

Michelle Tea reads at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh) with Sister Spit, April 23, 2010

1. When organizing a reading of out-of-town emerging writers, put one or two well-liked local writers in the lineup.

I learned this one when I organized my own cross-country reading tour a decade ago, with me, me, me-only on every bill. Friends in each city came out, but unless the venue itself hyped the reading, very few strangers showed up. I’ve seen this more recently from both the organizer side and the audience side—advertising a little-known name doesn’t go half as far as people coming out to see a familiar face or support a friend.

2. If you want to be supportive to those out-of-town writers, there’s various ways you can make them feel welcome and want to return to your city and your reading series.

An audience is the best thing you can offer, but there’s other ways to say “thanks” to that author who traveled on his or her own dime to get to your reading series.

*Is it possible to get a review for their book in your city, in advance of the reading? Can you hook them up with the local newspapers, and/or local book bloggers? At the very least you can have them send around some publicity materials (such as author JPEGs, links to reviews & the book’s webpage), to try to get a blurb or recommended event listing.
*Take them to a good (and affordable) restaurant and give them good chat before the reading
*Take them to a great bar and give them good chat after the reading
*Introduce them to local authors (at dinner, at the reading, at the bar)
*Buy their book
*Take photos during the reading
*Record the reading on audio
*Blog about, photo-blog, or post audio of the reading afterwards (for audio, get the writer's permission)
*Post the photos to Flickr (especially if they came out well) and include the author’s name
*Post photos to Facebook and tag the author

3. If you’re invited to be in a group reading in your own city, don’t slack on inviting your friends and fans.

This is one way a reading gets low turnout—each reader expects that a readymade crowd will be there waiting for them. How? Based on the other readers notifying THEIR friends and fan base. I think that some writers get worried about “annoying their friends” by constant self promotion. But often enough, your friends actually want to see you read, and your false modesty isn’t helping you or anyone else. In fact, if you’re in a group reading, some of your friends might come because they see that you AND another person they’ve been wanting to hear are reading together. But how will they know if you don’t tell them? (Don’t forget to list the other readers on the bill.) The reading organizer is counting on you to help get the word out. You don’t have to send out 15 email announcements, but send out at least one or two. Keep fliers on your person for when you run into people who’d want to know about your reading, and make the announcement at one reading about your next reading. Put in the labor and they will come.

4. For group readings, don’t take up more time than the organizer requests. Especially, don’t take up a LOT more time that the organizer requests.

It’s a bad karma move against your fellow authors on the bill, and when you wake up from your ego-stupor, you’ll realize that the audience didn’t want to listen to you for 24 minutes, either. They came for a group reading, and the best way to keep the event entertaining is to keep things moving at a good pace. If you’ve been asked to read for seven minutes, don’t rebel--just make it the best seven minutes the audience has ever heard. In other words, dare to be remembered for your writing and not how much time you commandeered.

5. Speaking of group readings, do they really need to be more than four or five people?

This one is certainly up for debate, and there are definitely circumstances that might warrant long lists of readers (AWP, or sometimes a book release party). But generally, those readings where I’m expected to sit in a chair and listen to 11 or 13 readers in a row make me feel like I’m being held hostage. Judging from the number of people who leave at intermission or after their friend reads, I don’t think I’m the only one. My vote is that excessive writer lineups are usually a nasty situation to subject the last two readers to, not to mention the audience. Among other things, it makes for bad mingling because everyone’s darting away under cloak of dimmed lights to avoid looking like the jerk who left early.

6. When asking out-of-town writers to a group reading, consider (and communicate) how much time you’ll give them to read.

Would YOU want to travel far in order to read for seven minutes? Probably 15 minutes is about the minimum you should ask out-of-towners to read. Again, certain circumstances like writing conferences or festivals may be an exception.

7. Speaking of out-of-town writers, take a moment to de-mystify your city for them.

Is there an affordable hotel you recommend, is there an area you recommend avoiding, is your city a new stop on the Megabus line? Is there a must-see attraction or a great bookstore in your area? Can you send them a link to a local restaurant blog, is there a regional driving idiosyncrasy they should know about? Etc.

8. So you’re running a reading series: How do you get, grow, and keep an audience?

These things can be a bit of a mystery, whether you’re a performer, an author, a reading series: who succeeds and who stagnates, or who explodes like a supernova and then fades quickly? I can’t pretend to have the secret formula, but here’re some thoughts.

*First ingredient: Good readers. Even something this obvious is tricky, because some series with “open door” policies can attract a really interesting mix of readers and performers inbetween duds, and in those cases, you don’t want to over-curate the lineup. But otherwise, I advocate a healthy degree of quality control so the audience you do get believes that every reading they attend will have something they want—even if they haven’t heard of the writers.

*Think of it as creating a community. Who is your series attracting and why do they keep coming back? Do they like certain publishing houses or sub-genres more than others? Do they appreciate a wide variety of writers or do they want all poetry, or strictly fiction? Are you offering a type of “scene” they want to be involved in that they can’t get anywhere else? Is your audience an extended group of your friends who come for the free beer you secured from that brewery sponsor? Are they foodies who come for the amazing pot luck? Do they come for the hip, unique, or well-known venue you’ve chosen, or the monthly music act that follows the readings?

*Advertise widely. Don’t rely on ONE method to notify your audience—just telling your friends, or just making a Facebook event page. Give people from different walks of life and different areas of your city a chance to discover you (to me, this is part of what the small press is about, at its best). Fliers at coffee shops, bookstores, and college English Departments; announcements on radio stations; asking your friends to forward emails to their friends; listings in the weekly paper and any relevant blogs; pushing for local book reviews; getting onto literary event lists; maintaining a good-looking blog or website for the reading series, etc.

*Get good at the technical side of the readings. Nothing kills the mood of a reading like long delays due to technical difficulties. If your reading requires a microphone and lighting, have someone on hand who knows how to adjust these should something mishap. Lighting should let your writers see what they’re reading, and hopefully flatter them, too.

*Offer consistency. The quality of the readers, the “extras” your audience comes to expect (whether food, music, low cover charge, etc), the reliability of the readings (EVERY month, not taking random months off), the general size and tone of the readings—nothing has to be set in stone, but when what you’re offering is virtually unknown writers, there needs to be something consistent for your audience to return to, and for.

Any experienced readers, reading series hosts, or audience members, feel free to comment with your own thoughts and observations.

Bookseller of the Month: Grant Cogswell

2011-05-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

I don't usually give a Bookseller of the Month award, but I'm inventing one for Grant Cogswell, who just made a death-defying drive through the most dangerous part of Mexico, all to retrieve some books. The books, waiting for him in Austin, were donations from Stateside friends and supporters, for his future store: Cogswell will be opening an English-language bookstore in the heart of Mexico City, Under the Volcano Books. The bookstore will be in the vein of Paris' Shakespeare and Company, catering to both a literary expat community and to residents of Mexico City interested in learning about the literature of the English language. Cogswell has said that he wants to foster a better dialogue between Mexico and America; instead of guns, drugs, border patrols, and anti-immigration talk, Cogswell wants to introduce each side to its more creative side. He'll be trying to lure American friends to experience his view of Mexico City (known in Mexico as Distrito Federal), and trying to offer the better angels of America to Mexicans who know mainly our indifference or our scorn. An international literary journal, Mexico Review, will be part of Cogswell's venture.

Grant Cogswell is an American citizen who spent his childhood in some far flung locales, including Paris. A filmmaker, journalist, and longtime resident of Seattle as an adult, he had an infamous and colorful campaign for Seattle's city council where he ran on a platform of creating a citywide monorail. That campaign inspired a book, Zioncheck for President, and a forthcoming movie, Grassroots, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal. A few years ago, driven by health concerns, Cogswell began spending his winters in Mexico City. He soon fell in love with the city's vibrant culture, and its likeness to some of his favorite childhood memories. La Roma is the area of Mexico City where Cogswell is seeking a space for the store, and it was laid out (in the early 20th Century) in imitation of Parisian boulevards. Its street vendors, street musicians, and lively sidewalk life remind Cogswell of the street life of 1970s Paris. Once serving as the haunts of William Burroughs and film location for Luis Buñuel, La Roma has been home to artists and expats for the last hundred years.

Cogswell will be selling books in Mexico City street markets until he secures a space to open the store. I'll be running an interview with the intrepid bookseller as the opening of Under the Volcano Books gets closer.

Make a donation to the bookstore here.

See a partial inventory of Under the Volcano's books here.

Read Grant Cogswell's bookstore blog here.

Find the Under the Volcano Books website here.

Interview with Bart Plantenga, Author of BEER MYSTIC

2011-05-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

This month, author, international DJ, small press veteran, and ex-New Yorker Bart Plantenga launched a "simultaneously serialized" novel on 44 websites (including this blog) located across cyberspace and across the world. Perhaps more exciting than the new media format is the news that Beer Mystic: A Novel of Inebriation & Light (set in a gritty, downtown, late-80s New York) contains absolutely engaging storytelling. A founding member of the New York writers' collective, The Unbearables, Bart graciously agreed to answer some questions about the novel, being a writer in the age of internet publishing, and what it means anymore to be "underground."

*****

Karen: Tell us a little about the formation of the Unbearables.

Bart Plantenga: The short tale is a bunch of writers already disgruntled with the state of publishing in the 1980s started to form a black humorist scrum and armed only with our wits and wit we began to not take it any more. We could groan and drink with the best of them. Despite other accounts, the group was formed by Mike Golden, Ron Kolm and myself. We used to meet at Tin Pan Alley, a legendary bar run by a lesbian socialist with beautiful but tough barmaids and a jukebox that included the Butthole Surfers and Mack the Knife sung by Bertolt Brecht himself. Here we would just hang around with no agenda other than to exchange writer’s war stories, complaints, near seductions, observations, suggestions for improvement of the deaf, dumb and blind world of editors and publishers.

The group expanded quickly; within weeks, British poet and scallywag Max Blagg, [tattoo] artist-DJ Matty Jankowski and Hakim Bey, president for life of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, had joined. Purpose totally evaded us – was it our way of avoiding the Spectacle, the value of being useful or were we just lazy? – or maybe we transcended purpose. It was only as the group reached a critical mass of a dozen in the later 1980s that we combined drunken kvetching with doing. We did produce one reading at TPA that went really well considering we were playing in the middle of Times Square in the shadow of Broadway theatres, strip clubs, and other distractive venues. With gaping hole in the ceiling and the drip of rain water in a bowl keeping time, the Bass Boys [Al Margolis of Pogus and Dave Mandl of the Coolies] had offered to serenade me with jazzy upright bass a la Kerouac atmos but showed up with 2 suitcases of toy instruments and noisemakers instead as I read and stumbled through the earliest ur-Beer Mystic tales ...

K: Did you write Beer Mystic knowing that it would appear in serialized form? What led to the decision to serialize it all at once instead of making us wait for intervals in between?

BP: BEER MYSTIC [original title: Confessions of a Beer Mystic] was conceived as a series of humorous-inebriated kernels of poetic approximate truths vaguely in the style of Baudelaire’s PARIS SPLEEN via Lord Buckley or someone like that. But this quickly went awry as a combination of factors – long-windedness, my love of frivolous detail [Kerouac said something like “detail is the essence”] and a many-splintered love life – wedged their way into the initial haiku-ish-ness. So, yes, it was serialized in the beginning but that quickly went nowhere making my admiration for Dostoyevsky all the greater – he wrote Crime and Punishment in serialized form. Each week another chapter, which meant he had to have internalized the entire book in his head from the start to keep it all straight...

I decided to serialize it online out of frustration with the straight world of publishing – a frustration that seemed frighteningly similar to the one felt back in the Tin Pan Alley days. Think of it as the guy who has just struck it rich, no one believes he actually has. So he shows up in the Klondike Tavern with a few leather pouches that he bangs on the table. Everyone grows quiet as he opens the pouches and spreads the gold nuggets across the clammy table. That is what I’m attempting here. Or maybe I am buying a round for the whole bar in the hope that this will lead to something, strangers conversing, collaborating, a furious infection...

That it has been called many nice things by many people [tongue-in-cheekly “the greatest novel never published” by eds. Al Vitale & Joe Maynard] and that agent after agent quickly dispensed with it, as if they were handling a soiled diaper, while editors simply never bothered to respond – did they reuse the return postage for their own personal use? Nah! I have absorbed my share of rejection, enough for a lifetime with this book alone. Making me a sort of humbler hardass. I used to keep a scorecard of all the rejections by magazines, editors, and agents ... But that’s all just tears in my beer now.

That is not to say that it did not see the light of day: before this delusional gesture of global grandeur it had been published in many esteemed mags like Frank [Paris], Vokno [Prague], Smoke Signals, Urban Graffiti as well as anthologies like Semiotext[e] SF, Up Is Up But So Is Down... Which, of course, is like snuggly, furry pets licking your wounds. It helps.

So, yes, it was out of frustration – and curiosity. I wanted to know what you could do with new and less-new internet resources and media. And the BEER MYSTIC strategy was to take it around the world city by city, URL by URL based on a blend of personal criteria: personal connection, admiration for the site, exotic place that would help string it around the world... And then have it neatly wind up at some wonderful editor’s doorstep, its esteem and preceding it down a red carpeted hallway. But let me just say that I NEVER in 6 million beer years ever thought it would take so much effort over so much time [1.5 years] to get this thing rolling.

K: Have you made sense of the latest publishing revolution yet? Do you think authors need to stay up to the minute with “the biz,” or do we just need to grasp enough to make something work for us?

BP: I have made some sense of it. It has its good and its bad. The good is the pantheistic reach and access. That is also its Achilles heel probably. New media is only effective for as long as it takes before everyone else is using it.

The edge is somewhat gained from its exclusivity not its massive democratic dissemination. So Twitter has maybe already reached its apex as far as effective media. Unless it begins to add new apps I guess. But think of it like this: you discover a great bar an interesting, fascinating and influential clientele – people just like you – and you love going to it, to hang, discuss, harangue, make deals. Then Time Out and The New Yorker discover it and suddenly the place is overrun by tourists taking photos and fashionistas who want to be seen with people who may or may not be TV stars where and suddenly the place gets too crowded, too loud and annoying and so you move on. This happened to Soho, to Greenwich Village, the East Village, Williamsburg, to the Cedar Tavern, to Email, to many online forums and lists...

But I do like the hypertext aspect of it: getting Facebook to communicate with Twitter and Word Press to interact with Weebly and LinkedIn is like a voyage through your brain. But ultimately these channels are all based as much on hope as on strategic interconnectivity. You hope that liking someone or some group will earn the favor in return. You follow someone and they will follow you, although, thus far, I see that most Tweeters are following a lot more people than are following them.

Many of these social media remind me of the boom in fashion restaurants in the 1980s and through to the present – places you read about, saw featured on TV and you go there not to eat the food – which is all prop and besides the point – but to be seen spending money and to see whose presence you are in. The contact high comes from this perceptual proximity to celebrities or at least people behaving like celebrities. And today, we can even quantify that in hard numbers.

But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a naysayer, I like many aspects of Facebook, for instance. Anyway, the fascinating still outweighs the frustrating. I see it as positive: you pepper the audience with scattershot FB images of yourself hoping that one out of a thousand will recognize you or connect with you.

K: Is Beer Mystic an e-book? Do you think that a story can BE an “e-book,” like, existentially?

BP: My second novel OCEAN GROOVE, OCEAN GRAVE uses the early version of hypertext [footnotes] as an alternative, parallel text. The notion of online novels is not bad in the sense of embedded links and rhyzomic straying from the strict well-worn path of the novel. E-readers seem fine to me and the idea of carrying a bunch of books on a piece of plastic seems great and if there are good search functions it might be better for the way I read - thumbing, scanning, pausing, going back, looking up references, footnotes leading me astray and eventually coming back to the main thread. If the backlighting makes it easier to read then I am all for it. My daughter is dyslexic – and through her behavior I discovered that maybe I am too – and I see the e-book as positive for people like us. She has trouble with italics, with lines and cramped leading and line spacing and loopy fonts so if text can be adjusted to meet these kinds of needs I see them as good alternatives especially since the old-fashioned book industry, with its bloated structure has meant books have become incredibly expensive. If e-books are ultimately cheaper then why not. I mean, books will not disappear – the intimate relation we have nurtured with them [curling up with a book] is a Darwinian adaptation that will not quickly be erased from our DNA. The jet plane did not lead to the extinction of the bicycle.

But, ultimately, reading is enhanced by hypertextuality. And yet, it can also be a pain, to be so easily distracted and led astray. There is something to be said for going to a park, just you and a book, no smartphone, no wifi – luxury or satisfaction or success will probably eventually be measured in how easily we can unplug our connectivity, how we regain our identity or sanity even through inaccessibility.

K: What do you make of today’s “webmag” small press environment? (Besides a serialized novel….) Do you think there are interesting differences between online mags and the little magazines, small press journals, or zines of yesteryear? What were your favorite literary periodicals in the New York 80s?

BP: I am a veteran and fan of zines [see Nice #4] but they – like cassette culture, like punk, like all DIY culture – have this inherent David vs Goliath heroic quality to them, which probably bloats their myth far beyond their actual reach. Producing them was great, reading them was challenging fun, selling them was, however, an incredible investment in frustration and disillusionment – capitalism sucks especially if you are the last fish in the food chain. Now that the notion of selling zines has all but disappeared there has been a renaissance in zines. Although, to save their sanity in a world of rampant democratization where everyone is a writer and no one a reader, editors have had to take undemocratic, elitist-like measures to stem the overwhelming tide of submissions. I can sympathize although it's irritating when you yourself are a submitting writer.

I think that the zines of yore had a clan-ish feel to them, like you could be part of an emerging subculture, which is, of course, a kind of [necessary] elitism, making it all the more titillating. Everything is now grand, cross-border and international – many ezines don’t give any indication of where they are located geographically, for instance. I still like the geographical aspect. This was important when I was choosing hosts for the BEER MYSTIC pub crawl. I wanted to know where they were. I think by becoming everything to everyone in an effort to be international you are at once everywhere and nowhere. The best is a local zine with roots, which is also open to the international.

Yikes! My favorite zines from the 80s-90s are zines that were often very personal and yet magnanimously open to strange and exotic work from outside their comfort zone. I name only a few that I remember because I was in some way connected to them: Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts [and all other Tuli Kupferberg & Ed Sanders productions], Ins & Outs [Amsterdam], Smoke Signals, Not Guilty, Beet, Rant, Massacre [London], Exquisite Corpse, LCD, Murtaugh, but also small presses like Low Tech, Little Caesar, Tomboctou, and especially Top Stories, which published mostly short fiction booklets by women, which I only realized after submitting stuff to them more than once... But I could name a hundred others.

K: You now reside in your native Amsterdam, after many years in New York. What’s it like for you to write about New York from afar? Is a writer in self-imposed exile full of a certain clarity? Does the setting of “New York 1987” create a specific inspiration for you?

BP: I have a gestation period of 10 or 15 years anyway. I need this so that the distractions of a very loud and imposing reality don’t get in the way of creativity. I wrote the earliest remnants of BEER MYSTIC on the spot but it took a good 10 to 15 years before the stuff worked its way through the synaptical guts of my brain to become something like a finished book. I just recently had the urge to start writing about my years in Michigan – college, factories, cab driver – while my years in Paris are 75% documented in the unfinished novel Paris Sex Tete. Time allows memory to do its work. The 1987 setting is when the actual drunken dowsing of streetlights occurred. The year 1987 presages 2008 in that it hosted Black Monday in October, the day the stock markets collapsed as a result of some investors’ bubble popping. The result was that in no time hundreds of small and intrepid NY art galleries and such who catered to the trashing-it nouveau rich vanished. Probably not as dramatically tragic as what happened in late 2008 but, in some ways, a mirror-image specimen of today’s depression-like ambience. Thus it resonates as something beyond the period. The good thing back then was that the less monetarily endowed no doubt suffered but that was somewhat mitigated by the fact that the mighty often fell harder and further and so suddenly the loud bravado of raucous yuppies throwing fistfuls of dollars at waitresses, assuming everything and everyone was for sale met its pleasant denouement. That small satisfaction is altogether missing from the circumstances of the less-well-off in the current crisis.

K: What distinguishes your Mystical Beer from Bukowksi’s beer farts, Jean Rhys’ lonely drunks, Guy de Maupassant’s cafe absinthe, Hunter S. Thompson’s Puerto Rican rum, or Truman Capote’s late-morning martinis?

BP: The main difference is that Furman Pivo originally sees beer as an escape from disappointing reality, a workingman’s soma, which, if quaffed with enough style or attitude will begin to act like a lifestyle. This changes irrevocably to something more serious – both utilitarian and poetic – when beer and its modus operandi leads to an entirely new level of interdependence between self and beer. Mike Golden [ed. Smoke Signals] has astutely noted this in his preface to BEER MYSTIC: “Though all similarities between Furman Pivo and Carlos Castaneda's journeys end with the discovery you've been transported to the next level of mutant cognition by Pivo's ballsy, yet elegant, street-wise hops, if you're stoked to the gills when that realization hits home, it won't help you hold on to what's right in front of your nose without drinking liberally from the language on a regular basis.”

Convivial escape gains a higher purpose as a result of his communion with beer.

K: What does “the underground” mean now that so much artistic output is instantly available on the internet?

BP: Underground continues to reverberate, make things rumble and continues to be appropriated and then instantly dashes away to new warehouses, enclaves, codes, sounds, always just out of reach of the appropriators. You know when the New York Times has discovered something that it has already long ago vacated the premises. The New Yorker now writes so reverentially about the Black Mountain Poets, the Beats and Punk – with a safe buffer of myth-making time and commodification between them – because they have become museum fare, entered the canon, part of the Spectacle. These very movements were the target of hundreds of snooty cartoons and articles in their heyday – I saved a clipping inserted into my original paperback copy of On The Road, which summarized some the opinions of some of the bastions of proper culture at the time inc. The New Yorker, which back then described it as a “forlorn heap of images of America... [which] is simply unintelligible.” But, hell, straight culture eventually “gets” or at least learns to consume most “underground” culture.

That is partly why The Unbearables in the mid-1990s organized a sit-in at the New Yorker, to demand that they “free verse” from its snooty confines. That is why the Unbearables protested the commodification [ultimate legitimization] of the Beats, when Ginsberg and Co. lectured and performed at Town Hall in Times Square where for a regal sum you could witness the Beats perform for exorbitant prices. This, of course, led to the scathing Autonomedia-published anthology called Crimes of the Beats, which did not savage the Beats personally so much as their commodification. Maybe we were just fed up with being compared to them, with the Beats being the only literary group most people could name. Ultimately, the best of their work continues to resonate beyond any attempts to appropriate it. After all, it was the ultimate Beatnik, Gregory Corso himself who, during the Town Hall proceedings, ventured outside to join the Unbearable picket line and yell his own anti-commodification couplets.

*****

Find Beer Mystic on the web here. Recommended reading!

The Pop-up Small-Press Bookstore Trend Continues

2011-05-23T13:01:00.000-07:00

First I was excited to visit the pop-up bookstore in the West Village, Ed's Martian Book (pictured above), which had the feel of an art installation dedicated to selling one title, Martian Summer (Pegasus Books) by Brooklyn author Andrew Kessler. Set to be open from April 12 to May 15th, the store had sold about 500 copies of the non-fiction book when I visited on May 1st.

Next I was excited to get back to Pittsburgh, where Fleeting Pages pop-up bookstore (above and below) opened May 7th, placing small press titles, zines, comics, and self-published books in a cavernous space recently vacated by Borders Books.

And now, I'm thrilled to learn that Veronica Liu, a writer, managing editor at Seven Stories Press, and publisher of Fractious Press, will be opening a one-week, pop-up, all-small press bookstore in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, on Broadway at 161 Street. The bookshop will open June 14 through June 20 and will host events such as workshops, readings, and performances. Stay tuned for more details.

See more photos of Ed's Martian Book here.

See more Fleeting Pages photos here.

Listen to Booksellers Read Works on Bookselling

2011-05-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Fleeting Pages reading, Bookstore Clerks Who Write About It, came together even better than I had hoped. The readings (poems, nonfiction, and short story) by booksellers about their experiences working in bookstores were at turns hilarious, insightful, neurotic, nostalgic, and poetic. Bookstores were described as the refuges of the high-minded and the homeless, the avant-garde and the out-moded, and at least two stories were about bookstore thieves. Eight booksellers participated in all, see the full list here. Please enjoy the above video of the readings, made from audio recorded by Will Snook.

Fleeting Pages is a Joy to Walk Through

2011-05-08T19:27:00.000-07:00

I loved walking through the vast post-Borders spaces and the aisles of 100% small press books at Fleeting Pages bookstore today, their second day open to the public. Here are some photos of the space and the shelves; more books will be arriving this week. If you are a small press author or publisher, I encourage you to send your books now--Fleeting Pages will accept new books through Friday, May 13th. Yesterday, they had a great crowd for opening day, with lines forming at the register--and they sold 321 items. Read Bill O'Driscoll's account of opening day here.

Thus far, two of Pittsburgh's independent bookstores have shelves at Fleeting Pages: Big Idea Bookstore (a radical bookstore and infoshop) is above and Awesome Books, a used bookstore, is below.

Fleeting Pages will be evolving throughout the month--today someone brought a typewriter by, for use in the store.

Below, books from Spuyten Duyvil Press and a pull quote from poet Julien Poirier.

Below, Dave Newman's novel and a recent title from Pittsburgh's Autumn House Press.

Hand-bound writings from author/blogger Jackie Wang.

Below, a well-lit corner space for writing and bookmaking workshops.

Earlier on this blog I called tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE a one-man avant-garde movement, and I'll stand my ground after seeing his display (below), a small fraction of his output of self-published, various-media texts over the last 30+ years.

Tim Hall on Undie Press resides between Sarabande Books and Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Green Lantern Press from Chicago surrounds Spuyten Duyvil from Brooklyn.

Below, Jen Michalski's stories from So New Publishing adorn a Fiction shelf.

Other small presses and publications I spotted on the all-face-out displays: 40-Watt Spotlight, Air & Nothingness Press, Barbary Shore, BOMB, Caketrain, Creative Non-Fiction, Fiji Island Mermaid Press, Ker-Bloom!, Lascaux Editions, Litmus Press, Low Ghost Press, Public Illumination Magazine, Rose Metal Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, and many more.

*****

As I walked up to Fleeting Pages' door this afternoon in eager anticipation, I saw a middle-aged couple spy a hand-scrawled sign in the window: "Come In, We're Open!" They scoffed: "Give the books away, already!" They thought it was still Borders trying to sell down the very last of their slash-price bankruptcy-bin books. But a customer leaving the store stopped to educate them on what was going on at Fleeting Pages. Inside, people from various generations read in comfortable chairs, browsed the eclectic shelves, or sat at a table making books. It seems like so far, all of Jodi Morrison's plans are coming together. Bravo to Fleeting Pages on a successful opening weekend.

Find more info on Fleeting Pages here: http://www.fleetingpages.com/

Previously: Interview with a Pop-Up Bookseller

Fleeting Pages Small Press Bookstore Opens Saturday, May 7th

2011-05-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

As you know if you've been following this blog, I'm very excited about Fleeting Pages, a pop-up, all indie-press bookstore that will occupy the space of a former Borders in Pittsburgh for one month starting tomorrow, Saturday, May 7th. I visited the (cavernous) space in the past couple of days to check it out, and Jodi was there with a few friends from the Pittsburgh area as well as folks who flew in from afar to help set up the bookstore. Check out Fleeting Pages website here. Read my interview with organizer Jodi Morrison here.

Goodbye Borders, hello Fleeting Pages.

Rumor has it that one of Pittsburgh's favorite neighborhood coffee shops has offered to run a cafe in Fleeting Pages, it would be off to the LEFT in the above photo. An empanada stand is another rumor.

Writing workshops and other events, such as film screenings and some readings, will be held on the downstairs level.

When I peeked in the first box of books (the ones that had already been priced and inventoried), what did I see but my good friend Julien Poirier's new poetry title, El Golpe Chileno! (From Ugly Duckling Presse.) Julien lives far from Pittsburgh, and I haven't seen him for a few years so it was very nice to see him show up here in this way. Hi, Julien!

I'll blog some more photos after the bookstore is open. Good luck to all the busy folks at Fleeting Pages working late into tonight.

Bookstore Clerks Who Write About It: A Reading in a Pop Up Bookstore

2011-05-05T05:31:00.000-07:00

Bookstore Clerks Who Write About It:
A Reading at Fleeting Pages
Thursday, May 12th
7:00pm-9:00pm
FREE
Fleeting Pages bookstore, formerly Borders East Side
Penn Circle, Pittsburgh

Bookstore clerks, bookstore owners, and former bookstore workers will read from their own writings on the bookstore biz, as well as the writings of others. Great indie bookstores represented include: Powell’s Portland and Powell’s Chicago, St Mark’s Bookshop, East Side Books, Jay’s Book Stall, Caliban Books, Awesome Books, Maelstrom Books, Burke’s Book Store, and more. Fleeting Pages is a pop up indie bookstore inhabiting the shell of an empty Borders bookstore from May 7th to June 4th, 2011. http://www.fleetingpages.com/

Readers will include:
Kris Collins (Caliban Books)
Nancy Krygowski (formerly, Maelstrom Books)
Karen Lillis (formerly, St Mark's Bookshop)
Tommy Mac (formerly, Powell's Books, Chicago)
and Bob Ziller (Awesome Books)

reading their own work as well as writings from:
Ron Kolm (Posman Books)
Corey Mesler (Burke's Book Store)
Kevin Sampsell (Powell's Books, Portland)

Kristofer Collins is publisher and editor-in-chief of Low Ghost Press, former co-director of the TNY Presents Performance Series, managing editor of The New Yinzer 2005-09. He is the book reviewer for Pittsburgh Magazine. He has managed Caliban Bookshop for the last 7 or so years and is the owner of Desolation Row Records & CDs. He was the assistant manager of the legendary Jay's Book Stall for ten years. A book of his poems entitled King Everything was published in 2007 by Six Gallery Press, The Book of Names was published by Low Ghost Press in 2008, and The Liturgy of Streets was published by Six Gallery Press in 2009. His latest collection, Last Call was published by Speed & Briscoe in 2010.

Ron Kolm is an American poet, editor, activist and bookseller, based in New York City. Kolm came to New York in 1970 and got a job at the Strand bookstore, where he worked with Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. During this period he became friends and colleagues with a group of writers who would come to exemplify the Downtown scene of the 1970s and '80s. In 1985, Kolm, Bart Plantenga, Mike Golden, Max Blagg and Peter Lamborn Wilson founded the Unbearables. Kolm has been one of the editors of their anthologies: Unbearables (1995), Crimes of the Beats (1998), Help Yourself! (2002) and The Worst Book I Ever Read (2009) all published by Autonomedia. Kolm's own publications include The Plastic Factory (1989, Red Dust), Welcome to the Barbecue (Low-Tech Press, 1990) and Rank Cologne (P.O.N. Press, 1991). His work can also be found, along with the other Unbearables, in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999), and in Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (New York University Press, 2006). He has collaborated on a novel, Neo Phobe, written with Jim Feast (Unbearable Books, 2006). Ron Kolm has worked at many of the great New York bookstores, including: Strand, East Side Books, St Mark’s Bookshop, Coliseum Books, and Posman Books.

Nancy Krygowski’s bookstore career began at the Portsmouth Bookshop, in Portsmouth, NH. While there, she was scouted by the owner of The Book Guild, the town's huge used and antiquarian book store, as she alphabetized books and made change, and was soon recruited to work there. (The book business is a lot like football.) She later moved to San Francisco and worked at Maelstrom Books in the Mission District for several years before coming to Pittsburgh. Krygowski’s first book of poems, Velocity, was chosen for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She was co-founder and booker of poets for the Gist Street Reading Series. She works at Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council as an instructor and occasionally teaches poetry workshops at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Karen Lillis (event organizer) worked at St Mark’s Bookshop for eight years, and is currently writing a memoir, Bagging the Beats at Midnight: Confessions of an Indie Bookstore Clerk, serialized monthly at http://www.UndiePress.com. A novelist, a freelance writer, and a small press advocate, she is the author of the novels i, scorpion (Words Like Kudzu Press, 2000) and The Second Elizabeth (Six Gallery Press, 2009) and [under the pseudonym Carol Lewis] the illustrated novella, Magenta's Adventures Underground (Words Like Kudzu with New York Nights, 2004). Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2010), and has been a finalist for a Golden Quill Press Award (2007). She currently resides in Pittsburgh.

Tommy Mac worked most of his adult life in libraries and bookstores including a memorable stint at Powell’s Books in Chicago’s South Loop. If you ever went there, Tommy’s not that Chinese guy and he’s not that hot guy who looks like Seal. He was that other guy dodging around in the stacks trying to avoid eye contact with the patrons. He read at the grand opening of Vox Pop Bookstore in Brooklyn, and was last heard spouting free-jazz palaver to a stonily indifferent audience at the old Bloomfield Beat Cabaret in Pittsburgh.

Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), 2 full length poetry collections, Some Identity Problems (2008) and Before the Great Troubling (2010), and 2 books of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009) and Notes toward the Story and Other Stories (2010) . He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, “The Martian Hop.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at http://www.coreymesler.com.

Kevin Sampsell lives in Portland, Oregon and has worked at Powell's Books since 1997. He runs the small press and zine sections and also coordinates their events. His small press, Future Tense Books, began in 1990 and publishes books by new and emerging writers of fiction, poetry, and memoir. His own books include the story collection, Creamy Bullets, and the memoir, A Common Pornography. He no longer has to change the marquee for Powell's.

Bob Ziller is an artist, poet, translator and singer. His translation of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo's Translated from the Night was the first English rendering of a complete text by the African surrealist poet. His artwork has been widely displayed throughout the U.S. - some of his portraits of writers will be on display at Fleeting Pages. His book release party for Van Gogh Surfing, his first collection of poetry, will be held at Fleeting Pages on June 1st, along with Jimmy Cvetic. He is the co-owner of Awesome Books in Pittsburgh.

Interview with a Pop-Up Bookseller

2011-04-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

This morning I sat down at a Pittsburgh café with Jodi Morrison, the energetic woman who is spearheading the Fleeting Pages pop-up bookstore project, due to open in Pittsburgh--for one month--on April 30th.

When asked how she came to the idea of setting a small-press indie bookstore inside the space of a former chain bookstore, Morrison traces the following arc: She recalls fondly the abundance of independent bookstores that once existed in Pittsburgh's most educated neighborhood, Squirrel Hill. A Barnes & Noble which landed there in the late '90s wiped out smaller favorites like the Squirrel Hill Bookstore and Three Penny Books. But when the Barnes & Noble itself closed in late 2009, Morrison wanted to take it back for the independents. She claims, "I immediately thought, 'Let's fill that space up with something different.' " She couldn't get the thought of inhabiting the space and reversing the cycle out of her mind: "And I just assumed that everyone else was thinking the same thing!" A variety of circumstances prevented her from sealing the deal on that real estate at that time, but when she heard about Borders going bankrupt, her mental wheels started turning again. She called up former Soft Skull Press editor, Richard Nash (for whom she had once worked), and he loved the idea of Fleeting Pages. "To have Richard be so positive and excited about the idea was incredibly empowering."

It's been less than two weeks since the Fleeting Pages website went live, and the response from interested small press and self-publishers has already been enormous; the project has gotten national press, and Morrison's inbox is flooded. She cites such publishers as Future Tense, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Weave Magazine as early responders, with Nash's latest publishing ventures, Cursor and Red Lemonade, as official supporters. She's even gotten some potential interest from some of the big publishers, but they want to know some hard-line statistics before they leap: "I've been getting a lot of 'Why Pittsburgh?' from certain publishers. They say, 'Let us know if you plan to do this in New York, Portland, or Seattle.' They are skeptical that there's a market for it here." But as I recently reported in Pop City, Pittsburgh's emerging arts are booming, its cultural audience is enthusiastic, and its small press scene supports far more independent publishers and reading series than a city of its size would suggest. In the past two years, the city has started two annual small press fairs: SPF, featuring literary and poetry presses, and PIX, for small press comics.

Morrison says she was reared on Pittsburgh's tight-knit indie community, and it taught her what to look for when she left. Growing up in Pittsburgh in the 90s, Morrison says, "There were great things happening on a smaller scale in the indie arts in Pittsburgh—in music, zines, and books. I learned a lot from that community, like how to treat other people and how to respect the work. But I left [in 1996] because the support for indie culture wasn't being reflected in the city in a larger way at that time." She has since enjoyed such subcultures in Boston, Chicago, and Brooklyn, before returning to an evolving Pittsburgh area in 2008.

As for the small press books that will stock Fleeting Pages' shelves, Morrison is adamant about an open-door policy ("as long as it's not illegal"), and is impartial as to whether the items are coming from literary presses, Christian imprints, self-published historians, or precocious 14-year olds. She states, "The culture of the book is changing so much. You no longer have to have an agent and a contract to publish a book. I'm interested in exploring who is creating books now, and also in questioning who determines our access…. Borders and Barnes and Noble aren't interested in stocking a title that would sell only one copy per store. But to a small or self-publisher, selling 600 or 700 books would be a huge deal." On the other hand, as a book lover with a wide range of reading tastes, she has great sympathy for the publishers who will be hurt by the chain stores' downsizing.

Fleeting Pages plans to have an online store, in part to accommodate the large response from people who want to support the project but can't travel to Pittsburgh in May. The company Bibliopolis will assist in setting up the online component. Bibliopolis (based in Berkeley and now also in Pittsburgh) specializes in creating websites for used and rare bookstores, with clients such as Argosy Book Store in New York and Caliban Books in Pittsburgh. But Morrison does stress the important role that brick and mortar stores have played in her life. One favorite bookseller in late '90s Boston used to greet her when she walked in the door with, "Jodi, I've got some titles I think you'd like." If she expressed interest in learning more on a certain subject, he would research more books on that topic for the next time she came in. "There was a librarian aspect to what he did," Morrison says. She remembers the vibrant conversations and information exchanges she enjoyed with other customers at the store, too—whether finding out about neighborhood news or upcoming music events.

"Bookstores have been a valuable cultural space," Morrison states. To that end, Fleeting Pages will be used not only for bookselling, but in a variety of ways—depending in part on how the indie community responds. Morrison insists that she doesn't want to over-determine what should transpire, but seeks input and ideas from other interested parties. Some requests that have already come across her desk include a communal typewriter for customers to use, tables available for writers around the store, and a resource library for writers to browse. Fleeting Pages will host events such as literary readings and writing workshops, film showings (including the Soft Skull movie, "Horns and Halos"), and a book arts exhibition.

Though the admitted insomniac is working hard between now and April 30th, Morrison is happy for Fleeting Pages to be a project in progress, and will allow its uses to evolve throughout the month it is open. She's also quick to point out that even though her name is the main one associated with the bookstore project, "One hundred and forty-seven other individuals have also pitched in, so far. It's not just me." As just one example, Morrison will have help from friends both near and far in staffing the store.

Jodi Morrison knows that "some people will walk into [Fleeting Pages] and see it as a success, and some will see it as a failure, like, 'This or that could have been done better.' But I hope that both camps take what they see and go build on it. This is just a start."

Photos depict three Pittsburgh bookstores:

Top: Awesome Books

Middle: Caliban Books

Bottom: Copacetic Comics

***

Read more about submitting your books to Fleeting Pages:

http://www.fleetingpages.com/category/submit-work/

Find Fleeting Pages on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fleetingpages

Guest Review: Stefanie Wielkopolan Reviewed by Margaret Bashaar

2011-03-28T04:28:00.000-07:00

Stefanie Wielkopolan, Border Theory: Selected Poems. Detroit: Black Coffee Press, 2011. Poetry. 61 pages. ISBN: 978-0982744048.

Border Theory is the debut poetry collection by Stefanie Wielkopolan. Wielkopolan grew up in Michigan, but got her MFA at Chatham University and currently resides in Pittsburgh. In spite of us sharing the same small city and the same small but vibrant poetry community, I had never heard of or met Wielkopolan. We weren’t even friends on Facebook (gasp!), so I went into this collection knowing only what I have mentioned above about Wielkopolan, and excited to read a collection by a young poet living in Pittsburgh.

The title Border Theory is quite apt – the place of each poem is set up in relation to other places in the book. You travel in a relatively straightforward way – from Michigan to Pittsburgh to Germany to Kentucky. While Wielkopolan leads you on a physical journey from point A to point B with little back and forth between spaces, each space is not so often described by what or where it is, as often as it is described by how far it is from another space in the book, or how it is different from another space. Places are measured not in city blocks or square mileage, but in hours away from one another, in miles of distance between the people residing in them.

In addition to a linear progression through space, there is also a distinctly linear progression through time in Border Theory. The poems set in Michigan tend to be about the speaker’s parents and grandparents, about the speaker's childhood. Transition poems from Michigan to Pittsburgh feel like poems that are also about the transition from childhood into adulthood, and so on. This time/space progression deftly reinforces the ideas of borders, with each move from one point to the next almost a rite of passage for the speaker. The only point at which this linear progression of time breaks off is when the speaker visits Germany, at which point some of the poems become about WWII. This is also the only point in the book when the events of the poems do not take place within the speaker’s lifetime or family.

While Wielkopolan brings the reader through a linear journey, the reader often is brought into a poem after the action - poems often seem to be recollections or explanations of aftermath and consequences rather than descriptions of action themselves. When paired with the plain, almost conversational language of the poems, this lends the poetry of Border Theory to a wisdom of careful reflection within the poems’ lines.

I ultimately felt very satisfied by Border Theory upon completion of the book. If you are going to read it, I would definitely recommend reading straight through, from beginning to end in order to truly take the physical and emotional journey mapped out in miles and hours.

Border Theory is available from the publisher website,
Black Coffee Press: http://www.blackcoffeepress.net
and from select bookstores.

Review by Margaret Bashaar
Co-host of The TypewriterGirls, editor of the anthology Make It So, and author of Barefoot and Listening (Tilt Press, 2009)

Pop-Up Indie Bookstore To Inhabit Former Borders

2011-03-26T14:46:00.001-07:00

Dateline Pittsburgh:

A new bookstore called Fleeting Pages will inhabit the space of a just-closing Borders in Pittsburgh city limits starting April 30. They will sell books by indie presses and self-publishers; hold book-making workshops, readings, and other events; and are open to other suggestions by writers and artists in the indie community. At this date, they plan to occupy the space for one month and possibly 6 weeks, after which they may regroup and pop up in another space.

Note that the organizers are seeking indie books, journals, and comics from small press folks based all over, not just Pittsburgh. See under Submit Work.

Find Fleeting Pages' website here: http://www.fleetingpages.com/

Find Fleeting Pages on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fleetingpages

***

Update: Interview with a Pop Up Bookseller

***

Guest Review: Alex Kudera reviewed by Joel Thomas

2011-03-14T04:26:00.000-07:00

Alex Kudera. Fight for Your Long Day. Kensington, Md.: Atticus Books, 2010. Fiction. 264 pages. ISBN: 978-0984510504.

Fight for Your Long Day’s protagonist, Cyrus Duffleman, does not fit the usual literary profile of professors – well-respected educators who juggle natural charisma and artistic brilliance, usually while battling demons available only to the privileged. Instead, author Alex Kudera gives readers a glimpse of the modern faculty majority: adjunct instructors. Like so many adjuncts, Duffleman’s story unfolds as he travels between low-paying teaching jobs and even a few hours weekly as a security guard. A dramatic adventure involving political assassination and dangerous troubled students unfolds around the well-intentioned teacher, but he doesn’t have time to stop and play the hero, especially without health insurance, until the novel comes to its madcap climax.

Kudera himself takes on a tough job with this novel. The writer clearly wants readers to understand the heavy load adjuncts undertake for low pay, and he includes specific details that real adjuncts will recognize as absolutely accurate. Students struggling with mental illness surfaces as a sub-theme, too, and he treats the topic with sensitivity even while illustrating inadequate resources for such situations at most colleges.

The author blends this gritty reality with humorous fantasy, deftly balancing heavy subject matter and an entertaining story. Hilarious caricature illustrates the idiosyncrasies and mounting frustrations for the character he affectionately nicknames “Duffy.” The novelist also cleverly sneaks in countless cultural references. This reviewer’s favorite appears when Kudera describes how Security Guard Duffleman stumbles into an underground punk rock show and gawks through scantily-clad girls’ mesh halter tops: “Duffy X-rays specks of” a body part, a pun that nods to readers who might also be punk fans. The plot involves some outlandish intrigue, with humorous references to a “President Fern,” a Homeland Security official with the surname “Cliff” (substituted for “Ridge”), and the dynamics of on-campus political radicals.

The combination of wordplay, satire, and over the top excitement make for an entertaining read. At the same time, Kudera’s thoughtful commentary reminds readers that Cyrus Duffleman represents many long, low-paying days worked by real adjuncts across America. The elements combine for an enjoyable book entertaining and exciting enough for a broad audience but thoughtful and sharp enough for university literature professors, even those fighting for their own long days.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, academia-related fiction, Philadelphia-based fiction, social and/or political satire, working class fiction, and urban fiction.

Available from the publisher and at select bookstores.
Distributed by Itasca Books (who work with Baker & Taylor and Ingram).
Read more at Atticus Books.

Reviewed by:
Joel Thomas

Midwestern adjunct writing instructor
http://thecasserolex.wordpress.com/

Fiction Review: THE ABSENT TRAVELER by Randall DeVallance

2011-03-12T04:51:00.000-08:00

Randall DeVallance. The Absent Traveler: A Novella and Other Stories. Kensington, Md.: Atticus Books, 2010. Short fiction. 186 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9845105-2-8.

Charles Lime, the protagonist of The Absent Traveler, is a Bartleby for our age. Instead of working for a lawyer on Wall Street, he’s employed by a big box store in a Western Pennsylvania strip mall. Rather than copying legal texts, he rings up electronics. He doesn’t live in an ill-lit corner of his office but rents an equally pathetic space in an unrenovated basement. A 26-year-old college grad who prefers not to have any ambitions beyond head cashier, Charles baffles his peers, enrages his father, saddens his mother, frustrates his manager, and washes over the collegiate coworkers who pass through his workplace en route to different cities and better jobs.

The Absent Traveler, its protagonist, and his “absence” are curiously compelling. Written in third person, though largely from Charles Lime’s point of view, the story offers a window into Charles’ thoughts. But none of what goes through Charles’ mind serves as easy explanation for his scant motivation, and little of his interior bonds us to him in comfortable sympathy. Meanwhile, we learn that Charles has a penchant for daydreaming and a fetish for travel literature. Charles prefers not to travel far in physical reality (he resides a short walk from work and a short drive from his childhood home), but has a strong instinct to escape: When he picks up a book, the dingy walls of the basement fade away. The insults of his father, a young woman’s rejection, his predatory alcoholic landlady: all recede to a safe distance when Charles is in the throes of an overseas tale. As his latest travel book becomes more and more a part of the novella’s text, it slowly reveals the deeply seductive nature of Charles’ will to elude reality--the darker (even destructive) side of his extreme inertia in real life.

Interestingly, author Randall DeVallance, who traveled with the Peace Corps to Bulgaria, has eschewed the instinct to create a traditional travel memoir: the narrative of the “authentic” exotic experience. Instead he weaves his Eastern European memories into the travel tale which draws Charles Lime in so fully, it leaves him absent to his own daily life. Preferring daydreams and alternative futures to actualities, The Absent Traveler sneaks up on us as a dark fable for the age of the internet: In a time when increasing numbers of us spend increasing hours interacting with a pixelated virtual reality, what transpires in the physical lives we're no longer acknowledging? Charles Lime is an anti-hero who makes a virtue of flying under the radar, but whose story won’t easily be forgotten.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, small press fiction, short fiction, and Western Pennsylvania authors.

Available from the publisher and at fine bookstores.
Distributed by Itasca Books (who work with Baker & Taylor and Ingram).

Technology and Literature This Week

2011-03-10T13:38:00.001-08:00

I came across a very interesting trio of pieces this week concerning the intersection of (small press) literature and the digital age:

Monday, Exquisite Corpse editor Andrei Codrescu waxed eloquent on NPR about how the Kindle destroyed the sacred silence that exists between a reader and a new book:
"...not only you do not own the new book you paid for, the entire experience of reading is shattered by the presence of a mob that agitates inside your text like strangers in a train station."
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/07/134342235/E-Book-Tarnishes-The-Reader-Book-Relationship

Tuesday, a New York Observer article about Calamari Press/Featherproof novelist Blake Butler talked about how the writer has lived on the internet for the past 10 years, created a blog for other far-flung writers who were alone until HTML Giant united them in conversation, and decries stories that resolve, relationships and sex in literature, and the following: "The idea of the writer at all has become overrated," Mr. Butler said. "To think that you're this orchestrating wizard and that you have to have this story to tell and you have to have lived and seen crazy shit to be able to put it out there is absurd. To me it's just as crazy or scary or fucked up to go outside to the grocery store. You know?"
"Blake Butler and What Happens When a Novelist Lives on the Internet"
http://www.observer.com/2011/culture/blake-butler-and-what-happens-when-novelist-lives-internet

Today, Six Gallery Press poet Salisbury Bushnell blogs about phoning author and Black Sparrow poet Ed Sanders and what it was like to learn about poetry before the age of the internet:
"There are certain things that have happened in my poetic development that most likely would have taken less intimate manifestations if I had such an emoticoning outlet at my disposal."
http://www.iamaparty.com/2011/03/learning-poetry-before-internet.html

Recent Acquisitions: March Edition

2011-03-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

Above left and below, Julien Poirier's new book El Golpe Chileno, on Ugly Duckling Presse. Poems and drawings.
http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=139

Above right, Amir Rashidd's chapbook of poems, Sweet Blood Call, with drawings by Lois Griffith.
Available at Awesome Books: http://smallpresspittsburgh.wikispaces.com/Awesome+Books

Below, I Hotel on Coffee House Press, ten novellas by Karen Tei Yamashita set in the heart of the Yellow Power Movement of the late 60s through late 70s.
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781566892391/i-hotel.aspx

Glass City, Poems by John Grochalski is new from Low Ghost Press and will be reviewed soon on this blog.
See a review on Burning River Press' website here: http://burningriver.info/?p=1128

Below, two new zines from ArtNoose: xXXXx: Straight Edge Erotic Fiction, and the newest issue of Ker-bloom!
http://www.etsy.com/shop/artnoose

Below, issue 54 of Public Illumination Magazine, drawings and short-short stories on the theme of SPICE.
http://www.mondorondo.com/pim/

And finally, a beautifully-crafted new book (below pic is a detail of the cover) from Encyclopedia Destructica: Public Record is a book of poems by Justin Hopper, written from 19th Century crime reports in downtown Pittsburgh. Illustrated by various artists.
http://publicrecordpgh.com/

In Paris a Billboard Boasted Paulo Coelho's Head 10 Feet High

2011-02-19T07:49:00.001-08:00

Lynn Alexander of Full of Crow recently posed some important questions about the small press:

*What is our obligation [as writers, voices, opinions] to this [small press] community?
*Are we cooperative or competitive?
*Is "community" the relentless pushing of the friends that push us?

*Is "community" playing nice?

To Lynn's thoughts I add a few of my own:

I think that the small press community CAN be in danger of mindlessly boosting our friends, or of being another sort of vanity press--and that (more over) we can be in danger of being seen that way, even when it's not true. For myself as a small press blogger, I have come to the conclusion that it is my obligation (and preference) to THOUGHTFULLY SPOTLIGHT the writers and presses I like and/or respect.

On spotlighting: I feel that the small press (being SO far below the big presses in advertising dollars) always needs a boost, and its worthiest voices usually deserve a wider audience. Equally often there are small press folks working hard on very interesting projects--or tackling ongoing dilemmas like distribution--in ways that merit attention even when I'm not in love with (or haven't had the time to read) the actual writing. That is, there are ways to add to the small press conversation that expand the diversity of expression and the scope of publishing--ultimately strengthening and testing and enjoying the fruits of the first amendment--which earn my respect even if the writing is not to my taste. But I don't wish to add more noise to the conversation by merely boosting mindlessly, so....

On thoughtful blogging: I have to admit that I dislike reviewing, but I also feel guilty about it. I wish I was a faster reader, and it's probably absurd to say I wish I was faster at writing criticism: Reviews necessarily take time to consider, research, and write well. But what I try to achieve in this blog is to offer some *context* to the small press books, presses, and authors I write about. The "librarian" aspect of this blog is similar to my journalism background; I'd like to tell you things about the small press without either condescending to those who already know, or leaving out those who don't know. I'd like to leave you with a bit of context, history, background; a flavor of the small press culture; a notion of which small presses are connected to which others; some objective information about a book you're not likely to have heard of outside of promo-speak by the author; a notion of why you might care that I'm spotlighting this particular title today. I try to assign reviews from time to time, and I thank my guest reviewers very much for that service to this blog.

What do you think about these issues? Do you think it's the role of small press writers to critique or support their fellow small press folk? Should there be an emphasis on exposing the "truth" no matter how harsh, or is that better left to the professional critics? Should small press writers you feel are bad writers be squelched early rather than encouraged, or should small press writers who do well be shot down when you feel they're overrated? Is there such as thing as an "overrated small press author," when 85% of the nation's readers still haven't heard of any of us? When even a literate magazine editor has never heard the term "small press"? Does "bad writing" add to the diversity of publishing, or detract? And can we still talk about "diversity" in the small press when the vast number of its players are white and college-educated? Or is diversity of expression an important thing unto itself that should be critiqued along with the diversity of the backgrounds (and content) of its voices?

Challenge: The Revenge of Print

2011-02-17T04:25:00.000-08:00

I have been surprised to run into small press friends lately who have NOT heard of the REVENGE OF PRINT 2011 Challenge, sponsored by Quimby's (Chicago) and Atomic Books (Baltimore). So I'm here to tell you about it. It's very simple, really. If you've ever made a zine, mini-comic, or other micro-press serial, make another one in 2011. Make one more issue. If you're sick of hearing about the "death of print" and the "end of books" and the "e-publishing revolution," remind the world about the Mimeograph Revolution that got you into this biz in the first place. If you've been taking a break, if you've gotten lazy or complacent, if you had a falling out with your co-editor, if your plans for the next ish are so elaborate that it's taken you three years to work on it....make 2011 the year that you get on with it. Be a comeback kid. Just do it.

You can join the conversation here on the Revenge of Print Facebook page. And no, that's not irony, or foreshadowing, or inevitability. That's the way we live now, in a world where digital communication and print publications can CO-EXIST.

What will you publish in 2011?

Small Press Authors Tour; Indie Bookstores Close and Open

2011-02-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

Elwin Cotman’s punk/folklore/fantasy story collection, The Jack Daniels Sessions EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010) has just been re-released in a newly updated second edition. The author is currently booking a reading tour for late spring, (only a year after his tour with Dan McCloskey) starting on May 28th at SubRosa in Santa Cruz. He plans to tour the West Coast, Southwest, and key spots in the Midwest. Find details and updates on the book’s Facebook page.

GoMetric’s Mike Faloon has a run of Southern California readings starting this Monday, February 14: On the Mommy Can I Go Out and Read Tonight? Tour, Mike will be reading with Todd Taylor (aka the Studds Terkel of punk rock) and Matt Hart (the Sideshow Bob of punk rock). Mike has been billed as the Bob Newhart of punk rock. Mike’s latest book is The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock, from Gorsky Press.

Jamaica Plain, a hip enclave of Boston, will soon welcome a new bookstore (a revamp of Rhythm & Muse book and music store) called Tres Gatos that will also sell vinyl records and Spanish-tapas eats. This business model reminds me of 3138 Dobson St. in Pittsburgh, a newly- renovated building that boasts a hip café on the first floor, vinyl-only music store on the second floor, and a powerhouse comics store/bookstore on the third floor. The Pittsburgh complex has been doing well for all three businesses, and we wish the new Boston venture the same success.

When Buffalo Street Books closes, it will leave vibrant college town Ithaca, New York (and its county) with no more independently-owned retail bookstores. “The positives and negatives of owning and operating an independent bricks-and-mortar bookstore are many with the perks far, far outweighing the bumps but for personal reasons and a rapidly diminishing bottom line, I finally have no choice,” says owner Gary Weissbrot on the store’s website.

In the What Goes Around Comes Around category: Shelf Awareness reports two indie bookstores soon to open in former Waldenbooks spaces in New England malls. Rivendell Books will open a second store in Montpelier, Vermont, and Wakefield Books opens tomorrow in Wakefield, Rhode Island. The Wakefield bookstore will even employ some of the former Waldenbooks workers.

Finally, Moby Lives writes on Powell's layoffs as well as Powell's 24-hour reading of Moby Dick.

Poet Ed Steck's Underground Lit Collection

2011-02-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

Poet Ed Steck has cleaned out his bookshelves and is selling his collection of underground lit, including a number of Allen Ginsberg titles, through Caliban Books in Pittsburgh. Check out these beauties:

Guest Review: DEGREES OF ELEVATION reviewed by Doug Mathewson

2011-02-07T06:35:00.000-08:00

Charles Dodd White and Page Seay, eds. Degrees of Elevation: Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia. Huron, Oh.: Bottom Dog Press, 2010. Anthology of short fiction. 186 pages. ISBN: 978-1933964393.

To successfully capture a place; to transport the reader to a different world using words alone is a mighty feat. By observation or remembrance writers create narrative portraits of a place. People are often shown to us through their language and peculiarities of culture. Capturing a sense of the land is harder. The dialogue of Stephen King brings us back to his native rural Maine. E. Annie Proulx, with her sharp eye and careful ear has taken us on a long journey from Newfoundland, down through Vermont to Texas and finally to Wyoming. Every place is unique, as are its inhabitants. Both are woven tightly together in a finely detailed pattern. They seem to be inseparable. This tie between place and people is incredibly strong in this collection of new Appalachian short fiction. Degrees of Elevation published by Bottom Dog Press is a treasure. These seventeen stories introduce us to the independent-natured people who live in a very natural land entirely dominated by coal. These are fictional works, telling the stories of people who are very real.

I was honored to be introduced to Scott McClanahan’s kindly “Mary the Cleaning Lady” who helps a young girl gain a greater understand of the world. Silas Hound, Richard Hague, and Denton Lowing treat us to their determined eccentric characters. Each living life to its fullest. When I read Alex Taylor’s story “The Coal Thief” I felt I knew Uncle Ransom from somewhere. Then I recognized him as every mythological trickster from the Monkey King to Br’er Rabbit!

Hard times, doubt and depression offset with the smallest kernel of hope prove the most stringent tests of people. These tales are beautifully told by Mindy Beth Miller, Jim Nichols, and Sheldon Lee Compton. I earnestly cared for every one of their characters. Marginalized sub-cultures are explored by Crystal Wilkinson and John McManus. These writers introduce us to people we may not even know exist. “Horseweed” by Chris Offutt and “Into the Gorge” by Ron Rash both show us so much in so few words about the wooded hills of Appalachia, and how times have changed.

Several of these stories may well stay with the reader for years. Two in particular will always be with me. “Haskell” from Chris Holbrook’s “Upheaval” is heart-breaking man who is coming apart physically and mentally. The story is told in specific small language that is so much a part of this man’s life. In “Country Boys” by Rusty Barnes, Reena puts Jimmy in some enticingly difficult situations till he gets over his head, and has to decide. Jimmy’s choice is not easy, but yours is. Support small and independent press by purchasing this fine collection of stories written by some of the very best authors you will find today in American short fiction.

Degrees of Elevation at Bottom Dog Press:
http://smithdocs.net/recent_titles

Degrees of Elevation at SPD: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781933964393/degrees-of-elevation-short-stories-of-contemporary-appalachia.aspx

Review by
Doug Mathewson
Editor at Blink-Ink
http://www.blink-ink.com/
Published by:
Full of Crow Press and Distribution
http://www.fullofcrowpress.org/

Recent Acquisitions

2011-02-06T04:24:00.000-08:00

Blink Ink issue #5
Journal of micro-fiction
http://www.blink-ink.com/

We’ll Never Have Paris, issue #7: Modern Fire
Zine of narrative non-fiction
http://neverhaveparis.blogspot.com/

Tel-Tales # 1: Cut Lines and Intricate Minds
Comic by Donald and Daniel Zettwoch
http://www.copaceticcomics.com/comics/1220

Salmon Poetry titles by Alan Jude Moore
Strasbourg:
http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details
and
Black State Cars:
http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details

Itinerant Poetry Booksellers Will Stalk You at AWP

2011-02-04T12:37:00.000-08:00

Exciting news: "Berl's Poetry Book Shop" is the name of a bookstore seeking a home. Until they find a brick and mortar space, poets/
proprietors Farrah Field and Jared White will be itinerant booksellers, hawking their wares at craft fairs around New York (such as Brooklyn Flea) and elsewhere.

Look for Farrah and Jared at AWP this weekend, where they will be seeking your poetry books (especially handmade chapbooks) to sell. If you're not at AWP, contact them through their blog: http://www.blogger.com/profile/03968672357168522423

Brooklyn will soon join Boulder, Cambridge, and Seattle in having the nation's few bookstores dedicated solely to poetry:

In January, the nation's third poetry-only bookstore opened in Boulder, Colorado:
Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Cafe
http://www.innisfreepoetry.com/

Groiler Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts has been open since 1927:
http://www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org/

Open Books in Seattle is the only poetry-only bookseller on the West Coast:
http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/

Eljay’s Used Books To Leave Pittsburgh City Limits

2011-01-31T05:22:00.000-08:00

When my partner and I made a scouting trip to Pittsburgh in the summer of 2005, the city’s bookstores told us stories that the streets could not. In that sweltering August, most live bodies were on vacation or hidden inside their air-conditioned homes and apartments, but Pittsburgh’s bookstores gave us clues as to who lived here and whether we wanted them to be our neighbors.

Eljay’s Used Books stood out to me on that visit as a bookstore that shared my taste in 20th century fiction, lit anthologies, literary journals, psychology titles, and even mass market classics; and I appreciated their hefty counter-culture selection. As a space the store had an awesome vibe, both funky and lived-in, inviting and with enough nooks and crannies for moments of solitude. A display window proudly featured an Emma Goldman poster, one front wall was covered in colorful paintings and other bold graphics, and further inside were wide aisles of wooden shelves, and a few comfortable reading chairs tucked in front of the fiction section. Eljay’s looked
and felt like a bookstore where both owners and customers loved to spend time--not due merely to a much-cited “love of reading,” but also a love of publishing history and book culture, a love of eclectic book spaces, a love of the first amendment, and a love of lingering in secondhand bookshops. I knew that if Pittsburgh could sustain and embrace a bookstore like this one, it was a city I could live in.

On the Move

On January 26, 2011, Eljay’s Used Books sent out an email to their customer list announcing their impending move from Pittsburgh’s East Carson Street to the South Hills suburb of Dormont. The new store is expected to open on West Liberty Avenue on March 1st. This will come, certainly, as a disappointment to neighborhood (and other city-limits) customers; Eljay’s has been in the same locale since late 1997. But co-owner Frank Oreto cites a few factors for the move. “Daytime foot traffic on Carson Street has been on the decline for many years now--there aren’t as many art galleries or antique stores on this strip as there used to be. Bar and restaurant traffic are up, which is fine for the South Side. But I don’t want to work late nights.” Though Oreto and his family used to live on the top floor of the building that houses the bookstore, he now lives in Dormont, about a five-minute walk from the future store. His business partner, Louise Richardson, also lives in the South Hills area. Add the cheaper rent in Dormont and the fact that many of Eljay’s shoppers already seek out the store from other neighborhoods, and the move starts to make even more sense.

Eljay’s will have about one and a half times the space in the new Dormont location, with a trolley stop a short walk away, nearby restaurants and other shops generating foot traffic, and ample parking across the street. A quick glance at recent census data shows that the Dormont zip code has more than twice the population of the South Side area. But are they book shoppers? Oreto hopes so. “Dormont is where hipsters go to have children,” he quips. “People I used to hang out with on the South Side back in the day….now they’re in Dormont hanging out with a six year old.” Even so, he seems to retain a seasoned bookseller’s attitude that in this business, it’s always a grand experiment. “I could be running a butcher shop in a year—who knows? At least I like meat.”

The South Side’s Carson Street once existed as a long stretch of watering holes for the J & L Steel mill workers (indeed, bars and nightclubs still comprise much of the street’s business). But in its post-steel decades, the street has also been home to some of the city’s most beloved and unique bookstores. River Run Books was a second-floor used bookstore down the street from Eljay’s, but it left town in the mid-90s. Bookseller Bob Ziller recalls two Carson Street storefronts: a great feminist bookstore called the Gertrude Stein Bookstore (Stein was born, after all, on Pittsburgh’s North Side) that was around since at least the mid 80s and closed “probably in the early 90s,” and a radical bookstore called The Pathfinder. St. Elmo’s Books and Music (just across from the Birmingham Bridge) sold new books and was known for its strengths in philosophy, religion and spirituality, cultural studies, queer studies, and gay erotica. They closed in early 2002 after sixteen years in business. More recently, Joseph-Beth Booksellers closed their Pittsburgh location on East Carson at the end of November 2010 (after six years).

Ziller, who used to work at River Run and now co-owns Awesome Books in the neighborhood of Garfield, remembers a time when the South Side literary scene was dense enough that Carson Street held an annual “Poetry Crawl.” Pittsburgh today has an abundance of reading series, but most now take place across a river from here--in neighborhoods like Garfield, Lawrenceville, Oakland, and the North Side.

So when Eljay’s leaves, what’s left on Carson? City Books, a used and rare bookstore often voted Pittsburgh’s best over its three decades, stands a few blocks away from Eljay’s current location. City Books is adored by its faithful customers, and has hosted numerous gatherings and events: It was home of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange for many years, and a St John’s University alumni group still meets at the store once a week to discuss Great Books. Bradley’s Books in Station Square (an urban mall a good bit west of the main Carson Street drag) specializes in best-sellers and some remainders as well as calendars, cards, and other gift items. Unless you're in the market for titles by L. Ron Hubbard, that’s it for self-described bookstores--but the Goodwill across the street from the former Joseph-Beth location is known for having a decent-sized book section. (In fact, it used to have its own store next door, Bookends on Carson.) I myself cruise the place with some frequency looking for good reads, in addition to scouting for first editions. The last time I scouted here I was excited to find a signed memoir by Catherine Texier, former co-editor of New York litmag Between C & D.

Sifting through three-dollar books for signed first editions has its thrills for sure. But the cavernous warehouse of Goodwill is no match for the warm wooden aisles of Eljay’s. March 1st will be a sad day on Carson Street; until then, 20% off the memories while they last.

Beltway Poetry Quarterly at AWP

2011-01-25T12:02:00.000-08:00

Today I stumbled across a great little interview about DC's poetry legacy with Beltway Poetry Quarterly editor, Kim Roberts. Roberts has organized a BPQ panel for AWP called "Four by Four: Beltway Poetry Quarterly Celebrates the Poetic Lineage of the Capitol City." The panel will happen on Saturday, February 5th at 1:30pm. Roberts reminds us how many poets were once based in DC, including Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and points out that:

"The Harlem Renaissance got its start in DC (not in New York--despite the name that movement now goes by), which brought to our city Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and others."

The panel will feature four contemporary DC poets discussing four historical DC poets: Living writers Regie Cabico, Brian Gilmore, Kim Roberts, and Dan Vera will discuss past literary lights Georgia Douglas Johnson (1920s-30s), Sterling A. Brown (active in the 40s and 50s), May Miller (60s and 70s), and Essex Hemphill (70s and 80s).

Kim Roberts will also be signing her own book of poems at AWP, The Kimnama, published on DC-based poetry press, Vrzhu Press.

Please see the original interview between Roberts and Joshua Gray here: http://www.examiner.com/poetry-in-washington-dc/beltway-poetry-quarterly-pairs-local-dc-poets-at-awp

Some Small Presses in DC

2011-01-24T13:51:00.000-08:00

It’s fitting that the annual AWP writer’s conference will be held in Washington, DC next week, as that city was recently named the most well-read city in the nation, according to one study. In honor of the conference, which will soon bring swarms of writers and presses to the Nation’s Capitol, I’m spotlighting a few DC small presses and journals.

Two great DC-area presses are featuring off-site readings during the conference. The literary journal Gargoyle Magazine (published by Paycock Press) will hold a reading at the Artisphere Dome Theater in Rosslyn, Va. at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, February 3rd. The event marks the 35th anniversary of the esteemed journal: Since 1976, Gargoyle has been publishing undiscovered or underpublished poets and fiction writers and producing beautifully-designed volumes of writing and art. I’ve always found the writing in Gargoyle to be both top notch and truly edgy--reminiscent more of Exquisite Corpse than of McSweeney’s.
http://www.gargoylemagazine.com/gargoyle.php

Atticus Books, a press of literary fiction since 2010, was featured on this blog in December. They’ll be hosting a Happy Hour reading with at least five of their authors at a bar called Bourbon on 18th Street (Adams Morgan), on Friday, February 4th from 5:00-7:00pm.
http://atticusbooksonline.com/

Gival Press publishes titles in short runs but gives each book a long life in print; they’ve been around since 1998. They publish three formats in three languages: literary fiction, essays, and poetry; in English, Spanish, and French.
http://www.givalpress.com/

Beltway Poetry Quarterly runs four online journal issues a year and has since 2000. They feature exclusively poets who live or work in Washington and the immediate area.
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/contents.html

Potomac Journal (not to be confused with Potomac Review) is a publication that juxtaposes, and sometimes blends, poetry and politics. Around since the early 21st Century, Potomac runs smart articles next to wise verse, and poetry reviews next to brief fictions.
http://thepotomacjournal.com/

Beltway Poetry Quarterly also provides this longer list of DC area publishers:
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/presslinks.html

Three DC Bookstores

2011-01-20T12:20:00.000-08:00

I had a brief trip (or a long layover) to DC last weekend and I got to cruise a few indie bookstores.

Fantom Comics is a small but (neatly) dense comic store. I was surprised to discover it in a first floor corner of beautiful Union Station soon after stepping off my Amtrak train. But Fantom’s location seems to fit well with one of their mission statements: “To introduce this under-appreciated yet quintessentially American art form [comics] to the public at large.” Carrying both serials and graphic novels, they had a small section of indie publishers including titles like Blankets (Top Shelf) and Love & Rockets (Fantagrapghics), and work by Charles Burns; that whole wall, in fact, was dedicated to non-superhero graphics. A small shelf nearby held comics collector supplies: plastic slip covers and cardboard backings. But the store was mainly featuring the more standard WHAW-POW! fare: DC and Marvel, X-Men, Batman, and She-Hulk, with some zombies and vampires thrown in for good measure. One-dollar comics had a large display, and Archie comics featured prominently on an all-ages rack. As I made my way around the central island that housed Fantom’s register (creating one square aisle around it), two clerks were doing what bookstore clerks do best: hashing out a recent breakup in a fishbowl. Actually, it's interesting to me that co-owner Matt Klokel has said that Fantom was inspired in part by the movie “High Fidelity”—he wanted Fantom to be the opposite of the shop dominated by snobbish, know-it-all clerks.

Fantom opened in 2005 in Tenleytown (Northwest DC) and moved about three years ago to Union Station. (From October 2009 through May 2010, they also had a store at the Pentagon City Mall in Arlington, but a technicality in their lease forced them to give up the space.) I really liked the feel of the compact, concentrated store set-up with so many face-outs. It felt a lot like a magazine shop you’d find in a train station, but without all the distractions: without the gum and candy, the souvenir keychains or the Vitamin Water, the antacid tablets or the neck pillows. Just comics.

Next I headed to Dupont Circle via the red line where Kramerbooks & Afterwords is a stone’s throw from the north exit of the Metro. I wasn’t even sure it would be open on a federal holiday, but I found it hopping with folks browsing, buying, and meeting friends for lunch in Afterwords, the bookstore’s attached café. Kramerbooks and its café have been around since the 70s, and the bookstore is known for its left-wing non-fiction, strong selection of literature, counter-cultural bent, and for being one of DC’s favorite pick-up joints. Some titles that caught
my eye were Emergency Sex and Other Desperate
Measures, an account of war-torn Cambodia in the 1990s told by three UN peacekeepers who face the limits of their idealism; The Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will written and drawn by Judith Schalansky; A Voice from Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth, by novelist Louis Auchincloss; and Brooklyn Was Mine, a non-fiction anthology. The register area featured tongue-in-cheek titles like Where’s Bin Laden?; Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up, A Woefully Incomplete Guide; and the anthology 101 Places Not to See Before You Die. Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press) and a novel from McSweeney’s stood out as two featured small press books.

While I explored Kramerbooks' shelves, two friends chatted about the Kindle over a table of paperback fiction by authors like Nicole Krauss and Dave Eggers:

“To be honest, I’d rather have a book in my hands.”

“Really? You strike me as a Kindle kind of guy. Maybe once you tried it….”

“Huh…maybe….”

Walking down Connecticut Avenue to the next bookstore, I bought a homeless newspaper, Street Sense, from a friendly street vendor. I later enjoyed the issue very much—I read the news that homeless newspapers have recently been started in Huntington, West Virginia and Greensboro, North Carolina; and that tragically, homelessness in veterans is up 85% over the last two years in Alabama (and is on the rise in the US in general). I read an inspiring profile of a formerly homeless fellow, and I really liked two poems by an ex-con, featured in this poetry issue. In the city where the political circus rules the headlines, Street Sense chronicles the struggles and everyday stories of the growing underclass. I’ve long thought that homeless newspapers are a great example of the independent press doing its job—providing a truly alternative set of stories to those of the corporate media.

KULTURAs reminds me of funky stores I used to find in DC in the 1980s. The two-story, human-scaled, mom-and-pop shop deals in secondhand books as well as a small selection of vintage clothing. Known especially for their art and photography books that fill the center of the long space, I found myself making a beeline for their paperback fiction. I had told myself I wasn’t going to buy anything today (or ok, maybe ONE novel), trying not to weigh my suitcase down with books. But in a good used bookstore, looking means buying. At least for me. Honestly, I have no idea what all this fuss is over e-books and Kindle: My idea of paradise is endless hours browsing in bookstores run by book buyers who know something about good literature and great presses. Heaven is losing hours carefully moving one pile of books aside to expose other rows of books, in search of the book I forgot I wanted, or never knew about before now, or never saw in such a good-looking font.

KULTURAs never disappoints. The last time I was here, I bought a gorgeous edition of the collected novels of Jean Rhys, complete with Paris photos by Brassai. On this visit I found many more than one book I wanted to buy: An early title by Clarice LiSpector, Night and Hope by Arnošt Lustig, a handsome John Edgar Wideman, a book about Kathe Kollowitz on Feminist Press, an album of photographs and ephemera connected to the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Grove edition of three novels by Witold Gombrowicz in one volume, early poems by Marge Piercy, a great looking copy of The Street by Ann Petry. I kept picking up books, carrying them around, discovering others and putting some earlier finds back on the shelf. I wanted them all, but the books that came home with me were three: The Situation in Flushing, a memoir of a small town Michigan childhood by the author of Subways are for Sleeping; The Queue, a banned-in-USSR experimental work by Muscovite Vladimir Sorokin; and an old mass market copy of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights.

Several customers came in and out of KULTURAs in the time I was browsing and sweating over my books, some to try on gorgeous vintage dresses, and a few George Washington University students looking for a Toni Morrison title. Though the owner searched even on his hands and knees, he reported, “It looks like that's the only novel of hers I haven’t got.”

KULTURAs started out in DC in the late 80s, but the owners moved their store to L.A. in 2005 for a change of pace, enjoying the surfing and good weather of Santa Monica for three years. They returned to Wisconsin Avenue, and in February 2010 opened a second store on Connecticut Avenue just north of Dupont Circle, in the neighborhood where it all began.

The owner and I chatted about bookstores and cities while he rang me up.

“Business is alright,” he told me. “Much better here than on Wisconsin Avenue.” When he heard that I live in Pittsburgh after years in New York, he asked how I liked my new city--”I keep hearing good things.”

Me: “It was definitely a culture shock at first, but I like it now...it keeps growing on me. There's a lot going on.”

KULTURAs: “When you get off the East Coast, it takes some getting used to....but once you look around, it’s more interesting...I think.”

Me: “Yeah, well, the East Coast is the known entity.”

KULTURAs: “Exactly.”

*****

Like I said, it was a very brief stop-over in DC, and my itinerary left out some great bookstores. Next time, I plan to revisit Busboys and Poets and check out Second Story (a strong recommendation from Issa's Untidy Hut) and Politics and Prose (RIP cofounder Carla Cohen).

Thanks to my brother Mike for alerting me to both KULTURAs and Busboys and Poets.

Guest Review: Allen Frost reviewed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

2011-01-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

Allen Frost. The Mermaid Translation. Huron, Oh.: Bottom Dog Press/ Bird Dog Publishing, 2010. Fiction. 140 pages. ISBN: 978-1933964409.

I know nothing about this author or his intentions. As I read this I wondered what it would've been like to read it at age 8. I reckon that might've been when it would've seemed the most magical to me. It seems like it'd be in good company if it were to be grouped with L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Evans G. Valens' Me and Frumpet: An Adventure With Size and Science, & Tolkien's The Hobbit - all of which stimulated my imagination, sense of wonder, & ability to daydream when I was 8 or 9. I'm further reminded a tad of novels for adults like In the Days of the American Museum by Robert Edric & Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. While in some respects the novel seems surreal it's not really stream-of-unconsciousness enough to be surrealist. It's more stolidly in the tradition of kids books everywhere - there're ethical underpinnings that're a relief to me as an adult who's often exasperated by the boneheaded macho behavior of the male world. THIS BOOK IS (mostly) GENTLE - & thank goodness for that. The chapters are short, the language is simple, the characters are 'exotic': a former deep-sea diver, a mermaid, dolphins, a magician, elephants. The world is post-empire & the forces of fantasy are free-ranging.
http://smithdocs.net/BirdDogy/BirdDogPage.html

Reviewed by
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/tent_index.html

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