Bücher veröffentlicht von Sagging Meniscus Press

Fiction. Everyone is constantly admonishing our narrator to keep quiet: You're full of bull hockey, college boy...Shut up and drink your beer. Or, 'Shut up, ' Michelle replied. 'Shut up, ' Michelle repeated. Or, Don't look up. At least don't shout anything when you do. She's here, on the balcony. Or, 'Shit.' Sarah spit this out like a too-hot cinnamon ball, pulled me off the dental chair, and led me to the closet with the skeleton, shushing me with her fingers. Or, Hush, be still. Tacete, tacete. Everyone admonishes him, when all he wants to do is shout the wonders, the horrors, the terrors that he and his older adoptive brother Galen face as one spiritual incursion after another manifests in their lives, moving from trickster poltergeists to forlornly wandering ghosts to intent fetches to avenging revenants. Perhaps, instead of admonishing him, everyone would do better to heed his early, youthful deliberation: I never heard his voice again after that night. If we humans could always recognize the last words we were ever to hear from each person we knew or even met, our lives would perch as fragile indeed, gathering tragedy every listening moment to lean over a dark cellar, of dark farewell

Poetry. In this prodigious outpouring of short pieces, Marvin Cohen looks into every corner of human affairs, even the darkest - death, reproduction, evolution, friendship, grief, the vagaries of adaptation and survival - with a joyful spark that never goes out.

Fiction. After a nefarious yet revered mayor bans horse-drawn carriages in his city, a reclusive horse-and-buggy driver loses his job, his lover, and his unborn child, as the desolate farm he has lived on his whole life deteriorates around him along with his sanity. But this lone wolf vows revenge. With language lean and lyrical, and humor dark and grotesque, HORSEBUGGY is not only a haunting portrait of what happens when man's capacity for intimacy and acceptance is undermined by his more violent and sadistic impulses, but also a tragic love story and a penetrating study of how we destroy ourselves as much with our moralism and self-righteousness as with our vice and self-indulgence.

Fiction. THIN RISING VAPORS by Seth Rogoff (author of FIRST, THE RAVEN: A PREFACE) is a richly psychological novel about enduring yet fragile friendship and the allure of nature and faith. Ezra Stern hasn't seen his best friend from childhood and college in the six years since Abel suddenly quit a successful career in New York to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. In late November, Ezra receives a letter from an estate lawyer telling him that Abel has died and that he has inherited the deceased's property in the lakeside town of Casco. That evening, as the first blizzard of the year approaches, Ezra leaves the city for Abel's house. Over the next seven days, Ezra searches to understand his friend's reclusive life and mysterious death by poring compulsively over Abel's voluminous posthumous papers, typed on an old Remington manual. As Ezra becomes increasingly immersed in Abel's writings, the coherence of the story of Abel's life builds and disintegrates in successive swells. Ezra discovers in the center of what had been familiar something irremediably alien, and in the heart of that total otherness--the unbearably intimate.

Fiction. Stephen Moles (author of THE MOST WRETCHED THING IMAGINABLE) returns with his most complex and rewarding novel yet. ALL THE WORLD'S A SIMULATION is a metafictional tour de force featuring Shakespeare, Snow White and an infinite number of evil Stephen Hawkings. While its main characters attempt to escape from it, the book constantly rewrites itself before the reader's gaze to reveal a profound secret about the power behind this and all other literary works. Thoroughly playful yet deeply serious, this extraordinary novel offers a personality-altering reading experience and an initiation into the realm of dark meaning. This edition includes as an appendix two related works, the novellas Fossil People and Life.exe.

Fiction. 2018 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Literary Adult Fiction. Al Lehman is a bourgeois Everyman, whose true nature is mysterious, radically unformed, incomplete, and frustrated, even as the quotidian circumstances of his life are drearily grounded in a fixed temporal reality. In this episodic novel, comic and philosophical, written in the late 70s in Cohen's highly idiosyncratic and extraordinarily poetic language, different aspects of Lehman's quest to exist in the scope of finitude, in the belly of a universe that does not fully nourish him, but is the source of all nourishment, are brilliantly distilled. INSIDE THE WORLD: AS AL LEHMAN is a companion novel to WOMEN, AND TOM GERVASI, whose central figure could be Lehman's wish-fulfilling dream projection: a Don Juan who exists in a world of limitless physical and emotional gratification. Taken together, the two novels comprise a kind of comedic Either/Or in which are explored a wide range of the merits and dismerits of the real and ideal.

Fiction. Every possible life--charmed, doomed, or both--of a Don Juan of 1970s New York, is captured, in its every conceivable inflection, in Marvin Cohen's comic episodic novel WOMEN, AND TOM GERVASI. The philanderer at the heart of the novel is hopelessly, effortlessly, universally, even fatally attractive to women. His oversized invulnerability is both monstrous and very recognizably human. Gervasi is a kind of necessary mythic extrapolation of the ego, an imaginary counterweight to the reality of self-loss, a King Midas whose limitless power is his own undoing, and who is ultimately shown, through Cohen's Cubist technique of exhaustively presenting every perspective on his character, to exist in a kind of Hell of spiritual isolation and inability to love. As always, Cohen writes with a vigorous wit; his poetic dialect reforges the English language into utterly original, surprising and delightful forms. Written in the late 70s and never before published, this novel is one of a pair with INSIDE THE WORLD: AS AL LEHMAN (published simultaneously), Cohen's novel about a non-Don Juan.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Religion & Spirituality. In WINGS, Israeli poet Amir Or's thirteenth book of poetry, transcendence is not a flight from the concrete intimacy of history and experience, but an opening within it, an interrogation of its baffling sweep, its beauty and its violence, that reveals, in the heart of unity, a profound multiplicity, the community of love, and the endless labor of birth. In these poems, we hear the sky speak with a music that seems to be wrought of hard roads, and vice versa: we see heaven and earth as shimmering mirages of each other, and the pilgrim's journey beyond time, towards liberation, as the secret heart of both. This bilingual edition follows WINGS with an encore, the brief Basho-like sequence Travelog, both translated by poet Seth Michelson. It also includes explanatory notes and an insightful critical afterword by the translator, and an interview with Amir Or by Nevena Milojevi¿.

Fiction. In METAMORPHOSIS, Doug Nufer first metamorphoses The Metamorphosis, Kafka's famous story, by subjecting a composite English translation of Kafka's full text to anagrammatic transformations that carefully retain the semantic outline of the original, but submerge it into the bubbling stew of zany detail that emerges from Nufer's richly inventive, often hilarious, and strangely beautiful wordplay. Then he turns his attention to an iconic excerpt from the beginning of the German text, rendering it into a dizzyingly diverse series of shapes and effects by various technical means in a virtuosic demonstration reminiscent of Queneau's Exercises in Style. I wonder where my project belongs, Nufer writes in an afterword; Maybe the appeal of venturing into a maze of translations and other constraints is analogous to the appeal a traveling salesman living with his parents and sister at the turn of the last century might have felt when, at the end of another awful day of work, he took up his needles to play.

Fiction. Marcus Schott, sacked from serving succour to suckers and loans to losers, leaves the office life to luxuriate in literature. His plan is to read every title featured in Dr. Peter Boxall's notorious compendium 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Motoring toward a small pre-purchased cottage on the Orkney Isles, Marcus soon encounters fatal hiccups in his scheme to compress a lifetime's reading into three years. These hiccups include skittish librarian Isobel Bartmel, self-cauterising critic Raine Upright, and the unpredictable happenings of the characterless Orkney peoples, too long trapped in their bothies of banality, each pushing Marcus further from his ecstatic vision of total list completion. A light comedy with a sunny paradisiac quality, rich in verbal virtuosity, Rabelaisian lists, and the occasional outburst of cheerful, cathartic violence, THE 1002ND BOOK is the ultimate summer novel against summer novels: an anti-crowdpleaser with a tidy, cinematic plot that should please both crowds and all those thoroughly depressed by them.