Bücher veröffentlicht von Sagging Meniscus Press

These powerful essays share critical moments of a writer's life: scenes from sixty years of passionate married love; suicides faced and suicide contemplated; trauma at the DMV; a night lost searching for a harpsichord in the mountains of Florence, Italy; the tale of a beloved cousin whose plane is shot down by Japanese Zeros; and a precious friendship between two women writers derailed by the poisons of religion and politics. In the titular essay (included in Best American Essays 2023) a food bank, assuaging the pandemic's terrors with gifts of food and prayers, becomes a portal for intimate confidences entrusted to us by a voice of unspoiled authenticity and perennial vigor.

Photo: to do with light. Phyto: plants and flowers. Proto: the first, the original. Nitro: it blows up.From Troy to Hiroshima, Crimea to the nuclear Nevada desert, we make our tracks over the war-scratched globe, and when we reach a ruin or a destination we read the markings, record them using various forms of photography. Later-or much, much later-someone else in turn will try to understand our silvery traces. These are the threads that Melissa McCarthy follows, unpicks, weaves again into a nexus of light and time: the mirrored silver cells of a shark's eyeball, sunlight glinting off the foam and sea wrack of the Aegean on flower with corpses, the silver salts of photographic paper, silver grave-treasures at Ur.Like an archaeologist in her own strange literary landscape, McCarthy cuts through layers of history and technology to realign the dead and their images. She examines both what can be photographed and what remains always just beyond the frame, and photography itself. It's a practice involving chemicals and the action of light. But it's also an organising principle for literature and beyond: there are marks made-by us, on us-that we can't yet fully see or understand, though they push on through to the surface, always re-blooming.

In the twilight of life, a black ribbon emerges from a frame and coils itself inside the mind of one of the great French chroniclers of the internal. Across the world, a young girl stares at an image in a book: a woman, naked but for slippers, jewels, and the same ribbon which so captivates the writer. At opposite poles of experience, one follows the ribbon as it winds its way round longings, regrets, and contemplations; the other, at the beginning of development and yet to discover the world, traces the ribbon with a finger, not realising how it will imprint itself upon her.Years later, the girl-now woman-encounters the ribbon face to face and on the page. Manet's Olympia and the words of Michel Leiris come together, and an imaginary conversation ensues. It will be a collision and collaboration of sensorial memories and observations on everything from desire and illness to writing and grief. These frames are used to examine both interlocutors; simultaneously, a frame of another sort is removed from Olympia and her artistic kin. Everything from her flowers, Louise Bourgeois's Sainte Sébastienne, and Francis Bacon's Henrietta Moraes are reimagined and given new regard.Songs for Olympia, written in the form of a response to Michel Leiris's The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, itself a highly personal response to Manet's painting, is an ode to the both the ribbon and the memory: what leads us to constantly rediscover ourselves and a world so easily assumed as viewed through a single frame.

Extracted from the maw of a resting shrew, these ten cankers reek of huff and qualm. A librarian teams up with a weeping bus-dweller to suppress a talentless writer. A man attempts a perfect equilibrium of pain and pleasure to forge a life of matchless keel. A triumvirate of Dans spiral into oblivion with operatic panache. Two sub-people struggle for ascension to the normal realm in a heckish caste system. Various narked sods explain the violent solutions to their popular problems in a tale that Butch Vig might call "titular". Someone explains the complex sociological web of mayhem that is the modern coffeehouse. Postmodernism makes a shocking return in a classic postmodern tale about postmodernism shaking its postmodern bahookie. In future Texas, women attempting abortions are held captive and forced to whelp at gunpoint. And in a finale one Dutch arborist has called "a botched stew", the world's unwritten characters mingle in a bardo where their untold stories flex and throb in painful collocation. For the first time in his life, the unacclaimed novelist M.J. Nicholls has written a collection of prose fit for hexagonal man.

Preacher is not a preacher, though death's vicissitudes clamor around him in a disturbingly ecclesiastic manner. When he finds a pit bull puppy by the side of the road and gets a job at a boxing manufacturer, he declares his luck changed. One small-town cop has doubts: "It ain't your luck needs changing, but the folks you meet." And so it stands, as the sun and moon revolve in their tango-or is it a waltz?-and whisper to one another.

The surreal, confessional, stream-of-consciousness stanzas of Joseph D. Reich's 300-page, lyrical epic poem How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) in a Hot-Air Balloon run up and down the page in a desperate, fantastical rage, hypnotically interrupted by a recurring refrain from which they emerge and depart on wildly varied journeys: probing the nature, origins and psychological derivation of surrealism, looking at persistent pain within and damage and devastation without in richly "ridiculous" images that are not only surreal but satirical and questioning, while also the best answer to the idiosyncratic machinations of authority. How to Shoot a Tourist is an exhaustive mythic encyclopedia of America and of Reich's teeming inner world.

The Discerning Mollusk's Guide to Arts and Ideas. Contributions by Shahd Alshammari, Polly Atkin, Greg Bem, Jesi Bender, P.J. Blumenthal, Lynn Buckle, Jesi Buell, Marvin Cohen, Michael Collins, Mark DuCharme, William Erickson, Tom La Farge, Lauren Foley, Jack Foley, Cal Freeman, Jason Graff, John Patrick Higgins, Tomoé Hill, Charles Holdefer, David Holzman, Kurt Luchs, Melissa McCarthy, Malcolm McCollum, Letty McHugh, R.S. Mengert, Jefferson Navicky, Kathleen Nicholls, M.J. Nicholls, Dan O'Brien, Harry Parker, Elizabeth Robinson, David Rose, Tom Shakespeare, Mike Silverton, Doug Smith, Will Stanier, Matthew Tomkinson, Dan Tremaglio, and Thomas Walton.

A grieving man with a guilty conscience is tried in a kangaroo court of the imagination for the bedtime transgressions of his youth. Will he finally suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or will he-er, um-get off scot-free again?

At the Husavík Research Institute, a paradise of Nordic perfection where the blemished are banished and the pretty are promoted, acne-ridden Magnus is sent on a bogus anthropological fact-finding mission to visit every village, town, and city in Wales to file "reports" for Iceland's upcoming colonisation. The reports he composes are fragments of snarky travelogue, highly suspicious tales of local folklore, unforgiving recaps of childhood trauma, and cris de coeur from a misanthropic outsider fated to stalk the wild Welsh countryside suffering squeamish erotic reveries about Helga Horsedóttir. Presented in alphabetical, achronological order, Condemned to Cymru is a comico-pimply picaresque, a digressive ramble into the dark heart of boredom, and the essential reference encyclopedia of self-hatred.

In Graham Guest's novel Henry's Chapel we watch a film by proxy, through the eyes of a narrator who offers a play-by-play account, complete with probing analysis, of Albarb Noella's Lawnmower of a Jealous God. Within this unusual frame we encounter the story of an isolated family in rural East Texas, a tragicomic tale of incest, abuse, mental illness and liberation. As meta-narrative and narrative merge into one another, the film's characters, its director, and implicitly the narrator and author themselves all become significant figures, while the film itself becomes both an immersive if ghostly medium and a distanced object of critical inquiry, its meaning and being inseparable from the metafictional organism that contains it. The final product is a kind of narratological incest heretofore unexplored.

Sorry, I Broke Your Promise is a text-cosmos entwined in its own birth and decay, suffering both obscurities of erasure and, amidst the resulting caverns of darkness, twinkling ignitions of wit and purpose. Quasi-intentional structures appear (or appear to) on every scale, summoning the ghosts of meaning and compelling them to a perpetual haunting, but stubbornly, through its own self-creating processes of distortion, redaction, and interruption, the text always holds any final possibility of meaning's materialization just beyond our reach; the forms of the visible are systematically undermined by the invisible, by the power of an all-encompassing field of "dark meaning." Lest this seem deadly serious, the trials and tribulations of Light in this dark cosmic minefield are both light- and dark-hearted, absurd and profound: the charming, taunting and befuddling pratfalls of a clown who is also, both openly and secretly, Hamlet.

Your Dark Meaning, Mouse is the ultimate field guide to the most bewildering and elusive topic in all literature: Dark Meaning, a subject that hitherto has only been accessible after deep study and courageous initiation to the most resourceful and sagacious of scholars, withdrawn, lab-coated persons who occasionally may be found stumbling about in forests, taking cryptic notes in their squared-paper moleskins from closely attended birdsong and astronomical observations. Now this indispensable collection of essays, stories, poems and scripts blasts the subject into public consciousness and beyond.