What came first in this Gothic Western, the ghosts or The Black Tree Atop the Hill?Set in an alternate American old-west that is hauntingly familiar yet strangely off-putting, Marisol is the first to see the tree on the hill, but that's only to be expected. As the witch of Jack Boyd's ranch, her job is to notice threats, even amid a most disastrous calving season.It is up to Marisol and the ranch's ghost to work together to stop mysteriously spreading trees from taking over their ranch, California, and the entirety of the country. But real magic requires sacrifice, and Marisol is not certain she is prepared to accept the consequences of what she must do to stop the trees' advance.This is a story about believing in intuition against the rain, about the violence of nature and of those who inflict it. Gothic gardeners explore the question of nature's home in a progressing world.Oozing with conflicting resolutions and twisty insides, this is a stunning debut by Portland artist Karla Yvette.
Death Row Restaurant is a debut satire novel about a disenchanted flight attendant searching for "authentic experiences" who instead finds an unexpected opportunity running a restaurant staffed by serial killers.Flight attendant, Dave Aslin, circles the globe in search of true experiences that he's never quite found. When Dave meets a canceled child actor from the 1980's sitcom 'Diff'rent Strokes' who is planning a radically new restaurant concept, his life's itinerary is forever altered. The proposal is a restaurant housed inside the gas chamber at San Quentin prison and staffed entirely by serial killers.Combining the craze for authentic restaurants and pop culture's love of serial killers, this debut novel balances satire with dark psychological horror to deliver poignant commentary on society's relationship to work. Death Row Restaurant gazes into the intersection between the serial killers we despise and the inevitable distortions of capitalism that shape our lives.
Accidental Genius features intimate and laugh-out-loud commentary from The Room cast and crew, including interviews from its star Greg Sestero. What a story indeed! A rollicking recollection of experiences from the legendary "so bad it's good" film. This comprehensively chronicled book offers a fascinating glimpse into the cultural phenomenon that brings together die-hard fans and newcomers alike.Everything you could have possibly wondered about The Room all in one book! Take a look at Tommy Wiseau's infamous 2003 release through the eyes of the people who made it. Get the low-down on bizarre audition calls, film set antics, and accounts from the very first fans who experienced The Room at its earliest screenings. Also including interviews focusing on the aftermath of the movie: Sestero's The Disaster Artist, where are they now, and its lasting legacy.Here you will get a glimpse of how it all began, why it remains popular, and just what audiences still get out of this unusual film that people love to hate.
The ultimate collector's edition of Juliet Escoria's short stories from Black Cloud, poetry from Witch Hunt, and new work, with an introduction by Scott McClanahan (The Sarah Book). The wickedly dark, funny and brazenly vulnerable writings that have made Juliet an indie legend are gathered in this collection. A comprehensive body of work, spanning a decade: brutal fictions, biting poems, eye-opening personal vignettes, a universe of unfiltered visions to be savored again and again, in the darkness and the light of our modern existence.Through honest musings on mental health, 9/11, and mortality, Escoria is a kindred spirit for wanderers and seekers on their dark soul nights, providing the kind of wisdom that only comes from a life well-lived.
Through lyrical and intimate personal essays, All Things Edible, Random and Odd delivers a portrait not just of a father who died, but of a daughter who kept living. Sheila Squillante's heartfelt and humorous essays introduce us to a father-a 1980s businessman and early adopter of the term "foodie"?and a daughter's complicated grief. It also moves beyond that grief, to embrace the intricacies and delights of how life grows from it. Food remains central throughout the collection with essays that serve up a menu (and sometimes recipes!) of Hawaiian beach seaweed, turtle soup, and fermented Icelandic shark. Nostalgia clashes with reality, through stories connecting memories to taste.With poetic prose, Squillante expresses the complexities of unresolved relationships, the importance of shared experiences, and how family and food make us who we are.
In this political satire-thriller, we follow a government official, an exiled influencer, and a burned-out delivery driver, living through a culture obsessed presidency that signs the policy to Kill the Rich.The year is 2038, America’s new President won with a simple, snappy campaign slogan: Kill The Rich. Now in office, his administration kicks off with a televised public hanging of Kim Kardashian, whose lip kits have poisoned a working-class city.The execution sets three very different people on a collision course that will change the nation forever. Jay, a senior adviser and best friend to the President, is hyper-focused on finding the next billionaire head to roll. Chloe, an influencer living in Russian exile, is willing to do anything to get her life of luxury back. Sasha, a burned-out pizza delivery driver, is desperate to find her missing brother. Their stories converge in a cryptocurrency-fueled secessionist city in the Nevada desert where they must come together to thwart an insurrection by the internet-poisoned, meme-obsessed, richest man in the world.
A series of poetic remixes, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER might be considered a form of spirit possession.Each poem in this manuscript takes up another poet's work- a selection that ranges from Lorca to CD Wright, Hồ Xuân Hương to Sappho, Agha Shahid Ali to Ishrat Afreen? and alters its DNA, infusing it with an other idiolect. This is an idiolect of pleasure (the wordplay, puns, and cadence of the Vietnamese language) and of pain (the long shadow of the Vietnam war in the lives of those who survived, barely survived, and became refugees). Like any possessing spirit, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER speaks in tongues: using others' words to articulate a personal pain. Shorn of their original context and content, the poems in this collection? mutant-hybrids who retain a trace of their skeleton while dressed in entirely other clothes? become a play of voices that call into question notions of authenticity and self in poetic production, a postmodern twist for the classical craft.
The famous bi-sexual libertine who would be more at home on Tinder than at a Roman Cathedral, gallivants through the streets like brush strokes to become a Baroque 16th century icon.The year is 1604 and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is a superstar, his blockbuster paintings packing the pews of Rome. Caravaggio should be reveling in prosperity, but the artistic trailblazer and nefarious street-brawler is his own worst enemy. While the genius paints masterpieces, the ruffian in him can't stay out of jail. Caravaggio is a man at existential odds with himself until falling in love with Lena Antognetti, the prostitute modeling his newest Virgin pictures. Caravaggio paints Lena into a life of wealth and celebrity, but the power couple's provocative fame earns them a horde of resentful and jealous enemies. I, Caravaggio dramatizes the superstar's psychological unraveling under the sexual and political pressures of the Catholic Reformation.
The heavyweight of hardcore horror returns with ten hard hitting new short stories and seven brutal epic poems exploring the darkest soul of humanity and the cruelty of life without pulling punches. Wrath James White turns his unflinching eye upon the gruesome, the violent, the tragic, and the erotic.
In her electric debut, Madeline Cash synthesizes the godlessness of a digital age into a glimmering, sublime, life-affirming collage of stories.Earth Angel is a book like no other, the paperback that swallowed the smartphone. An Isis recruit, an adolescent beauty queen, and a childless millennial walk into a bar. A Biblical plague rains down head lice, aerial drone strikes, gender non-conforming frogs. An app throws a slumber party for a friendless office worker. Texans in the winter, the Taliban in Springtime, Teslas with ℮☥ bumper stickers, Frozen 5 in Arabic, architectural consistency laws in Laurel Canyon, the longest recorded nosebleed in history.An unhinged jet stream that is ultramodern and poignantly timeless, capturing the angst of the post-millennial generation.
A surreal Blacksploitation joint for the 21st Century.An Occult, Erotic Mystery bout Reverend Daddy Hoodoo helping his Wommin find their Lost-R-Missing Pussies with the help of the extraordinary Madam X. Featuring heartless gangsters, Vodoo sex Magick, and a young Wommin in distress by the name of Abysinnia who is in desperate need of the services of Daddy Hoodoo. This tale leads from Between the Sheets to the Streets to the Boardroom Suites- and Beyond.
Cops on bikes, undercover security in the supermarket, TSA agents wondering why there appears to be a gun in his bag, Keith Lowell Jensen has a lot of run-ins with all manner of cops. Sometimes they arrest him. Sometimes they beat him up and arrest him. And sometimes he gets away scot free.In his second memoir collection Jensen tells the hilarious tales of his various arrests and other run-ins with the law. Getting his charges dropped after making the public defender and the judge laugh, performing an hour of jokes for his cell mates in the drunk tank, the comedian has used his sense of humor to get in and out of trouble, and that same sense of humor makes this a fun and engaging read.Storytelling comedian Keith Lowell Jensen has performed all over the world, including headlining the First International China Comedy Festival in Shanghai. He has recorded 8 comedy specials, including his latest Not For Rehire. This is his second memoir collection following 2018¿s Punching Nazis And Other Good Ideas.
In his debut collection, Marston Hefner brings a unique voice and playful style to meditations on self-acceptance, the folly of youth, and how love can lead to actualization and destruction. Through moments of family intimacy, work presentations, vacations, doomed relationships, or businessmen chasing the ephemeral, Hefner shows we are lovable and acceptable despite the shame we accumulate through the years. Sometimes it's only through stories that we can make sense of who we are and where we are going.
A complex and entangled text that explores inherited trauma, the presence of ghosts, interspecies communication, the dream world, grief, and human/animal separation. Weaving wisdom from her shamanic practice and the interstices of language, and in the difficult moments anticipating the deaths of her beloved dog companions, Separation Anxiety marks the first collection of poetry from acclaimed prose writer Janice Lee, and is a meditation on inhabitation and existence beyond the human.
In 2014, after the release of his debut novel, celebrated writer and visionary publisher Kevin Sampsell switched gears and turned to a new creative obsession: making collage art. Initially influenced by the wild cutup language of William S. Burroughs, Sampsell soon discovered countless modern collagists that inspired him to take his art further and further from where it started. Years later, he finds himself at the center of a growing movement of 21st Century cut and paste.I Made an Accident showcases over 200 of Sampsell's collages, exploring a range of styles: hilarious sight gags, subtle cultural jabs, elegant mysteries, colorful surprises, fragmented hauntings, and gloriously strange accidents. Combined with Sampsell's sharp and lively poems, this book is a feast for the eyes and brain and a nonstop entertainment.
56k dial-up. Ouija boards. Crushes.Internet Girlfriend explores the intersection of the internet, the occult, and sexuality.These poems mirror the abyss: divination, webcamming, myth, instant messages, queerness, witchcraft—all in the name of trying to feel something.Attachments area
Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, author of La Belle Ajar, brings you a horror death themed collection with mortality, murder, and muerte oozing from every one of these terrifying verses.Inspired by NightWorms, Carmen Maria Machado''s Her Body and Other Parties & Nick Cave''s Murder Ballads, get ready to be haunted by serial killers, fatal femmes, poisoners, as these premeditated murderesses that slay you in terrifying poems. One step inside these grave inspired verses, you will want to re-experience We Are the Ones until the very end.Embrace the terror and prepare to be Possessed, Cepeda''s poems will mesmerize you with his bone-chilling death rhymes from the other side.PRAISE FOR WE ARE THE ONES POSSESSED"We Are the Ones Possessed is a vivid, heart breaking, and tragic collection of poems that drips from the pages with the viscosity of blood. Cepeda is a Latinx talent you should be reading as a horror and poetry fan. I highly recommend this beautiful book that reaches out and grabs you by the heart and throat. I adored Night Stalker Tattoo on Her Back." - V. Castro, author of Mestiza Blood, Goddess of Filth & The Queen of the Cicadas "With nods to various icons of art, music, and literature, these pieces are so beautiful and stunning. Gilded in twilight and darkness, We Are the Ones Possessed is a collection of poetry that guides us along fragments of moments, with the tortured and the torturer. Scenes in dark rooms, across environments and situations pulsate with bloody ecstasy, attraction, and betrayal. We Are the Ones Possessed shows us not only what we''ve had done to us, but what we have done." - Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award nominated author and poet "Cepeda''s haunting poems, inspired by existing written work and visuals, are a medley of daydreams & nightmares, floating in the middle of a fateful dance of death and sex. The winged beauty in the shadows of love/revenge painted by his exceptional verse in We Are the Ones Possessed will take your breath away."- Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and SFPA Grand Master
Rooted in the beauty and violence of Florida''s landscape, these poems are an exploration of love, sex, martyrdom, home, and what we bring with us when we choose poetry to record the intimacies of a life.
Radically imaginative and intense, challenging language to be slow and fast, soft and hard, drunk and sober, What Are You performs its own destruction and recreation.Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction-going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back."An incantatory and hypnotic work of voice, What Are You exists at the apex of creation and destruction, desire and shame, innocence and experience, violence and tenderness, rapture and suffering, hunger and the denial of flesh. To read it is to feel the terror of falling from a great height-but wanting to; maybe even choosing to jump."-Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star and True Love "Lindsay Lerman is brilliant. This book manages to be fiercely direct and enigmatic at the same time. It hit me the way Duras, Zambreno, and Lispector do."-Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book "What Are You is relentlessly and elegantly erudite, yet deeply felt and compulsively readable. There is nothing in literature, philosophy, or her own life that seems beyond Lerman''s capable grasp. She has a particular genius for weaving together disparate elements that would leave a lesser writer dumbfounded."-Nicola Maye Goldberg, author of Nothing Can Hurt You "Passionate, dispassionate, hypnotic, deadpan, ecstatic, Lindsay Lerman''s What Are You, read it now. Now."-Kathe Koja, author of The Cipher and Dark Factory "Lerman''s prose evades categorical thinking and forces you to reconcile yourself to the fact that individuals and their worlds are dynamic, reflexive, and reciprocally determined. It''s a slippery book that demands we deal with it in its full complexity, without recourse to the simplifying unities we would normally use to reduce people to what they aren''t. Lindsay Lerman is insidiously powerful; you don''t realize what she''s done to you until it''s done. Purgatory in the sense of catharsis, a text for devouring and devotion."-Charlene Elsby, author of Hexis and Psychros "Holy shit! This book had me hypnotized. It''s raw and rigorous and sexy and relentless and completely on fire - it''s a cold beer beside an active volcano, and it''s delicious. Like Chris Kraus and Maggie Nelson, What Are You wrestles critical theory to the ground and emerges with a triumphant, radical, thrilling, clarifying new form of writing about sex, feminism, and the self."-Kate Reed Petty, author of True Story "Lindsay Lerman gives a sense that the author and the reader are on the run together, foraging a path of discovery as they flee. With prose both beautiful and relentlessly shifting with experiment, this book meets the reader at not-knowing and carries them forward, scouting the territory just one step ahead."-Alex DiFrancesco, author of All City and Transmutation
After giving up on his dream of being a published writer, Chris is plagued by a series of nightmarish visions of grotesque creatures. As the visions manifest with greater frequency they start targeting his young daughter. They are finding their way into his world and only he can fight them. Chris must uncover the truth about his connection to this strange, sadistic realm, and plunge headfirst into the unknown if he wants to save his daughter and himself.
Dubbed a 2018 Debut Writer to Watch by Publisher's WeeklyNudes on Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021 and an SPD Best SellerThrough diaristic ellipses, Nash crafts an origin story of obsessional masochism.Drawing on the nostalgia of a nascent digital age and grappling with an eating disorder, indie cult author Elle Nash paints a realistic and poignant portrait of a teenager's quest for self-identification on both sides of the computer screen. Using Livejournal entries, we meet our protagonist, in her messy transition into adulthood in the midst of grappling with calorie counts, boys, and being honest with who she is only online. Following up her cult fiction debut Animals Eat Each Other, Nash shows she belongs in the same camp along with exciting feminist literary disrupters the likes of Melissa Broder and Alissa Nutting.It's 2005. Lucy shambles through the last weeks of her senior year of high school, jonesing for a thinner body, desperate to connect with another human. Who is reflected back at her when she is sleeping with someone, when she is puking into the toilet bowl? Who is reflected back when she's alone? Only the internet knows, where she muses on the concept of her ?self? through her Livejournal, with a cadre of online friends who are definitely NOT pro-anorexic. Everyone's sick here, but at least they understand.
AT SEA is a collection that? at times introspective and confessional, at times perceptively aimed outward, toward a vertiginous world? sails the pathway between trauma and healing. Readers are taken aboard into a microcosm where wonder meets waterlogged torment and self-harm; where grief, euphoria and longing coexist; where womanhood is as joyful and dizzying an experience as it is searing; where peeling the layers of cultural identity is like plunging into the most opaque and briny deep. While the act of remembering has solitary, melancholy tinges, Aïcha Martine Thiam's pen never wavers, nor does it stray far from the impulse to bear witness, to do justice, and to connect with kindred souls.
A radically open and unrestrained text, an actual person in a concrete historical situation is a fragmented and meandering poem that captures what it feels like to be one person in a vast, overwhelming, crisis-ridden world. Generative rather than directive, the poem magnifies the small, overlooked moments in life; explores flickering thoughts, impressions, impulses; and wallows joyfully in unending confusion.
Hello. I am Homeless. Soon your head will be my home. No...Your head is already my home. My thoughts are inside of you as you read this. Therefore, I am inside of you now. Living inside you. Walking around in my boxer briefs. Scratching my balls. Rearranging the mental furniture inside your head. Opening the space up in case I feel like entertaining. I plan on entertaining. Thank you for letting me live inside your head. Thank you for giving me a warm place to stay. At least for now.I am Homeless. Hello. Hello...
These poems were written in 2013, 2014, and 2015. They attempt to apply the logic of an illiterate person writing the statement "I can''t read" to poetry. They all failed. Enjoy. "Everything in this book is anatomically correct. It really makes your synapses fire. I especially related to ''russet'' as I am also not a potato. Not quite sure what he has against punctuation though." - Margaret Krackeler, MD"Have you ever wished to inject pure emotion into your body? A syringe containing the pure essence of life itself, wriggling with passion and love and pain? Have you desperately spent years seeking out such a thing? Well it does not exist. But this book is pretty good."-DougDoug, beloved YouTuber
An Exhalation of Dead Things explores the intersections of mental illness, poverty, queerness, sexual assault, and resilience.
Not unlike his literary forebearers Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, Damian Dressick brings us a crackling series of dispatches fresh from the postmodernist front. This daring gathering of brief, innovative stories tantalizes the intellect nearly as much as it illuminates the human heart. Drawing from his quiver of flash fictions, prose poems, lists, pie charts and micros, Dressick''s narratives are fully engaged with the wild disorder that everyday feels more and more like the sine qua non of our fractured now. Meet meth-addicted grizzly bears, a coal mining Jesus, grieving alcoholic parents, and murderous villagers whose only speech is culinary in this fleeting edge tour de force....Fables of the Deconstruction.PRAISE FOR FABLES OF THE DECONSTRUCTION"This collection of sixty-three stories is as rich and varied as a patisserie, as nasty and brutish as a Japanese architect in the mid-sixties, as delicate as the swift-moving scents in the coastal air at midnight. To call these stories short-shorts or "flash fiction" is to do them a disservice. While some are indeed short, and many are pleasantly flashy, every one hits home with the weight of boxer''s punch, every one is more beautiful, and more fun, than the last. This is a first rate performance by an artist to be reckoned with." -Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake "Like Donald Barthelme, Damian Dressick finds himself on the leading edge of the junk phenomena. The thingness of things falls apart delightfully right before our dilated eyes. Fun for the whole goddamn nuclear family."-Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone "Fables of the Deconstruction is funny, sad, dreamy, and brutal. The stories here veer off in strange directions, happily disobedient to the conventions that plague so much of our current grindingly cautious literature. This is a credit to Damian Dressick, an excitable and exciting new writer who will probably be a big deal someday and, in fact, if you check your heart, already is." -Steve Almond, author of Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life "Damian Dressick writes with gusto and sly humor, and Fables of the Deconstruction introduces a bold and robust new voice of impressive range. A heady debut."-Gary Lutz, author of The Complete Gary Lutz "Damian Dressick''s Fables of the Deconstruction expertly explores the question: why not? Wandering through Dressick''s terrain, you can leave your own (real) life behind for a while. Sit back and enjoy. This little book will make you both happy and sad-with footnotes."-Sherrie Flick author of I Call This Flirting and Reconsidering Happiness
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