It’s 1912, and the New York Knights-Errant are off to their worst start in franchise history: 61 straight losses, part of a grueling 120-game road season, with no home ballpark to return to. The team’s terrible conditions are the fault of their mysterious new owner, whose bizarre decision-making takes a toll on them from the start—condemning the Knights-Errant to a weary season crisscrossing the country in a haunted old steamtrain; communicating through cryptic cablegrams which offer no practical guidance for winning (“The game as metaphor / Abner Doubleday’s lie”); and perhaps worst of all, drafting into the rotation a 28-year-old rookie righthander from Bohemia by the name of Franz Kafka, who claims not to be a ballplayer but a writer of literature and who has, by his own admission, never held a baseball in his life.

THE STRIKEOUT ARTIST is a novel about art disguised as a novel about baseball, and vice versa. It’s about unsung losers, forgotten steampunk sports leagues, and most of all, about the spirit that leads us in the pursuit of our elusive dreams, and which keeps us forever stepping out onto the field of play, even when the game’s already been lost.

There’s no other novel like Joseph Bates’s The Strikeout Artist, a how-did-he-think-of-this miracle starring the great Czech writer Franz Kafka as a professional baseball pitcher in early twentieth century America. This book is a masterpiece of surrealism, but it’s also a bighearted, hilarious, eagle-eyed story about what it means to be a friend, an artist, a teammate, and—for better and for worse—an American. The Strikeout Artist is a work of genius.

—Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

A few years ago in some dim tavern I heard about a novel in progress following Franz Kafka’s legendary season as a baseball pitcher. Well, that’s a premise to stir one’s expectation and fancy. And now here it is, The Strikeout Artist, and I find that it’s even grander than I imagined. This novel is funny, poignant, atmospherically rich, and winningly weird, and I loved the time I spent in this world.

—Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special

You don’t have to know anything about baseball to fall in love with this astonishing novel in which Franz Kafka performs as an unlikely star pitcher. Delighted by Bates’s kinetic, daring plot, you’ll have to stop often to laugh, then in the next moment you’ll be drawn up short in wonder by the surprisingly tender heart of this novel. Bates writes about people lurching in despair and yet redeemed by loss. A novel about failure that’s a marvelously wrought success.

—Lee Upton, author of Visitations and The Tao of Humiliation

Joseph Bates is the author of the story collection Tomorrowland and a book on writing craft, The Nighttime Novelist. He teaches in the creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 414 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-391-1

$22

Pre-Orders Welcome

The Strikeout Artist by Joseph Bates Book Preview

Jack Skelley’s poems are mind-expanding, vision-inducing, orgasmic, psychedelic drugs, but their poetic beauty is no hallucination. His method: discovering the transcendent in the trivial, the mythic in the mundane. He is a Pop Gnostic who unearths the utopic desire just below the surface of our ultra-mediated culture, hoping to usher in “a Golden Age of pantheistic spasms.” Like any realistic revolutionary, he demands the impossible – “I want a planet of toys … jihad of joys … a thick, chewy anarchy in a candy-colored shell.” Interstellar Theme Park is a funhouse that grants those kinds of wishes and more. Book your trip now!

—Elaine Equi, The Intangibles, Coffee House Press

“In Skelley’s world everything and everyone is volcanic. Cities become backlots; celebrities become saviors. Sharp, always spectacular. One of my very favorite writers on the earth.”

—Dennis Cooper

We need Jack Skelley’s work now more than ever. Jack’s mind on the page helps parse our media-besotted, celebrity-drenched, digitized lives. Whether he’s writing a kaleidoscopic erotic prayer to a brand of salad dressing, or making textual bedfellows of Wagner and Betty Rubble, or soulful insider anecdotes from the short life of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, or musing tenderly on post-modern fatherhood, Skelley’s ability to syncretize pop culture, history, product placement, Catholicism and beyond is a necessary wonder of the contemporary world.

—Amy Gerstler, An Index of Women, Penguin Random House

Jack Skelley has been sifting through the detritus of our modern age for 40 years, decoding hidden truths buried deep within our pop icons, media obsessions, consumer culture(s) and other soft delights. As brilliant as the L.A. sun, a singular visionary.

—Lee Ranaldo, American musician, co-founder Sonic Youth

William Blake warned us about the “mind-forg’d manacles” that inhibit the imagination—if only he could be alive today to experience Jack Skelley’s writing as it breaks those manacles. Spanning four decades of Skelley’s fascination with (and suspicion of) America’s society of the spectacle, Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing is a wild ride through the radiant debauchery of contemporary popular culture. Skelley’s irresistible poetry and prose take us on a tour of a cosmic, psychosexual playground that features, among others, a mock-epic mocking Elon Musk, a supplication to “Botox Jesus” for the miracle of migraine relief, a Mary Wollstonecraft so “busy inventing goth” that she bequeaths us punk rock, the distorted echo of Meat Puppets guitars heard in a lover’s gurgling stomach, twelve Lady Gagas performing “Lady Madonna”—in short, as Skelley writes, all “the levels / of paradise.”

—Tony Trigilio, author of Ghosts of the Upper Floor

Jack Skelley’s Interstellar Theme Park is a Monster. The gravitational pull of its linguistic and other intelligences is so strong, that it’s hard to get close without being sucked in. The television is always on and it’s always playing America’s game, channel switching audaciously through melopoeia, phanopoeia, logopoeia, and radiant space. Don’t read it unless you’ve got a ticket to ride through the luminous dimensions of its cosmic ra(n)ge.

—David E. James, Rock ‘N’ Film: Cinema’s Dance With Popular Music, Oxford University Press

“Despite my dislike of seeing my own name, you’re really a good writer – never what’s expected.”

—Kathy Acker

Jack’s Skelley’s books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), and Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e)). In addition to many magazines, blogs, etc, Jack’s work is widely anthologized. Collections include: Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (ed. Nicholas Christopher, Anchor Books), Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry (ed. Jim Elledge, Indiana University Press), Coming Attractions (ed. Dennis Cooper, Little Caesar Press) and Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, (ed. Andrei Codrescu, 4 Walls, 8 Windows).

Jack is an award-winning journalist/editor with 40 years of publishing, from The Atlantic to Salon to Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the former Executive Editor and Associate Publisher of Los Angeles Downtown News. He was editor, publisher & designer of Barney: The Modern Stone-Age Magazine, featuring major artists and writers.

And Jack is songwriter and guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale (SST Records).

Book Information:

· Paperback: 202 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-411-6

$22

Pre-Orders Welcome

Dennis Barone’s latest work, A Field Guide to the Rehearsal is a most unique book, an open-form, subtly off-beat narrative, a mixture of poetry and prose, of memory and concrete, image-filled metaphysics. Or as the narrator asks the reader in “Decalogue”:

Rather than a frame for a story, consider the limitations of framing a life. End with a grand metaphysical speculation situated in the most ordinary of things. Mystery creates a frame as its only explanation. Consider the hotels actors occupy.

And Barone’s wonderfully mysterious, deft book does exactly this.

Barone maps an extraordinary range of human characters, predicaments, and emotional states to reveal the humor, anxiety, and wonder of being in the world. But there’s a real kicker embedded within this larger human landscape. It is this: The personal landscape of the narrator who deals with a serious health issue, the major surgery due to it, the recovery that follows, and the life memories elicited during before, during, and after this event. Thus, this field guide maps the personal as well as the larger landscape of life’s terrain. And on both levels what terrain it is, encompassing the everyday, the psychological, and the spiritual.

The four numbered sections of the book map aspects, or markers, of the parallel landscapes. Through an exquisite series of prose poems, Section I provides a general description of the human endeavor in living life. We travel the “…old road that holds earth and stones — persons like-minded” and contemplate those forces that “must dwell between consent and the scared inescapable world.” (“Oath”) Interestingly, we first hear of the narrator’s operation early on in the section in “The Wild Animal-Breath of the World” but only when the narrator tells us of his return home from the hospital. Such poetic slicing creates a spiral of time and events throughout the book.

In the penultimate piece of this section, “Day by Day,” Barone inserts poetry into his prose to deepen the connection between the personal with the larger landscape of humanity, mapping out a path that takes the reader down life’s road. At the end of Section I we realize that this narrative jumping, this supposed rehearsal, is no rehearsal at all; it is the performance.

In Section II, the field guide becomes illustrative, with the author rendering a view of various characters through sharp images that evoke precious moments and states of mind. Here Barone’s sharp wit, humor, well-honed poetic ability render reality not only in concrete terms but with a dash of the surreal. Everyone of these extended prose poems mark and identify human emotional traits, provide a way for us to diagnose ourselves and to view the state of mind of the soon to be patient.

Then, Section III, through the mixing of memory and the metaphysical, spirals into a DNA-like molecule, the final act. Barone meshes the narrator’s personal terrain with humanity’s, the larger landscape that overspreads the entire narrative. The narrator’s operation has taken place, the recovery has set in, just in time for the pandemic. Barone has brought us full circle. And what is left? The poetic image: A woman named Alice finally lights a cigarette, and “The wind makes a sound like speech and she tries to decipher the words.”

Thus, the fourth and last section of A Field Guide to the Rehearsal, Barone’s “Coda: Untitled,” becomes our antiphonal, the narrator’s poetic breviary for the field guide, chocked full of all that is needed to read the landscape: mentions of maps, statistics, folders, highways, mission reports, blueprints, archives, and a call to us, the reader “that you read the handwriting.” That the coda ends with the narrator lapsing into a list of crucial memory fragments of his life universalizes Barone’s deeply spiritual attachment to the personal, typified by the lasting Madonna-like image of his “Juniper Street Mama/Angelina.”

—David Cappella

I have been reading your delightful stories in On the Bus. Or maybe I should say, your sentences as each one seems like a corridor unto itself, even as it drives forward to the next. You sure succeed in creating a fully engaged reader, as you appeal to the cat in me: where will the narrator go next? Like taking a driving lesson in narrative hermeneutics!

—William Boelhower

Dennis Barone achieves many different textures in such a slim book [Field Report]. He lets his mind range over a large, weird, various territory … his world is funny and ominous and perplexing, his way of bringing the reader there strangely satisfying. Barone’s writing opens many doors and leaves them open.

—B. G. Firmani

“Day by Day” is pure Dennis Barone poetry, all shot through with joyful juxtapositions, humble historical arcana, places appreciated and simultaneously made strange and familiar … This is the song of a well-seasoned songbird, unafraid to fly too close to the sun as well as grooved flight paths below.

—Kevin Dann

Dennis Barone is the author of many books of fiction, poetry, and literary studies. Blaze VOX published his book On the Bus: Selected Stories in 2012 and his volume of poetry Frame Narrative in 2018. Other works include Beyond Memory: Italian Protestants in Italy and America (SUNY Press) and Sound / Hammer (Quale Press). He has edited volumes such as Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776 (Wesleyan University Press) and New Hungers for Old: One-Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry (Star Cloud Press). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Saint Joseph, and currently serves as the Poetry Editor for the Wallace Stevens Journal and as President of the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 122 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-397-3

$16

A Field Guide to the Rehearsal by Dennis Barone Book Preview by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

Jay Q. Wilson Jr. needs help desperately. His celebrity museum in Hollywood slowly goes into debt while Wilson’s landlord wants to jump his rent so much Wilson soon won’t have a home for his collection of celebrity memorabilia. Worse, he had always hoped that eventually he and his work would impress his assistant, a woman he secretly loves. But it’s not looking good until Jay finds out that Hollywood’s greatest urban myth, JDP, might actually exist. If Jay can get his hands on JDP, it might be enough of a celebrity score that could save his shop. Oh, and JDP stands for James Dean’s Penis. It’s apparently floating in a jar somewhere in Los Angeles that Jay hopefully finds before he loses his business and the woman he loves.

“Ron Burch’s second novel examines class mobility unexpectedly and intelligently, while ruminating on why materialism rots our best intentions. JDP shows the remarkable lengths to which we are consumed by obsession. Q is pitiable, merciless—a collector fading in a dynamic industry, scheming for his shot at immortality. With JDP, Burch has crafted an endlessly funny and wry Hollywood conspiracy for our modern times.”

—Jason Teal, We Were Called Specimens

Ron Burch exposes the offbeat edge of California’s most mythical urban places populated with tourists feeding the quest for memorabilia of dead celebrities—leading to the ultimate prize, JDP. Tough and gritty with equal parts heart and offbeat humor, the novel’s innovative narrative pumps new noir through the veins of Hollywood in an ironic journey with an unlikely XXXL protagonist who runs a celebrity museum and stretches the limits of anti-hero iconography.

—Aimee Parkison, author of Sister Séance and Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman

“A down-and-out Hollywood tour guide’s absurd quest to find a dead celebrity’s body part, Ron Burch’s JDP is a funny and entertaining romp through the Los Angeles you won’t see on your Starline tour. Part The Big Lebowski, part The Cruise, Burch’s novel is a witty love letter to The City of Broken Dreams.”

—Leland Cheuk, author of No Good Very Bad Asian

Ron Burch’s fiction has been published in numerous literary journals including South Dakota Review, Fiction International, Mississippi Review, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. BLISS, INC., his last novel, is also from BlazeVOX books. He lives in Los Angeles, where he works in the entertainment business as a producer and screenwriter.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 246 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-382-9

$22

JDP by Ron Burch Book Preview by BlazeVOX [books]

“A virtuosic display of wit, humor, and surreal beauty. Like the erasures of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and Yedda Morrison’s Darkness, Emily Anderson’s partially masticated reimaginings of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series gets inside the logic of its source text. With uncanny insight, Little reveals what had always been simmering just beneath these novels’ familiar surfaces. (Mostly doughnuts and motherbutter.)”

—Jesse Miller, Reviews Editor, Full Stop

There’s an icloud casting shadows over Middle America but by now “the prairie’s over.” Pa is the strapping advent of mono-crops, debt crisis and consumption. Ma is bone marrow and fresh eggs, embodied westward expansion. Laura is in the bank though “the bank had scalped her.” (In)dian is what is entered (in)to, “fair profit, fair skin.” Mary? Mary is “quite in.” And “there are so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying ‘Sioux.’”

Apple cheeked readers who curled up with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books as children and cheered the little family and their epic industriousness, please be forewarned. Anderson’s devilish re-writing exhumes and animates a series of haunting and sometimes disturbingly funny sub-narratives. Delving deep into the American psyche, Little will leave you wondering how you missed the “Certificate to Missouri” clutched in your complicit little hand. What else have you squandered? Who else have you “loved?”

—Yedda Morrison (Author of Darkness, Crop, and Girl Scout Nation)

“I can’t remember the last time I read something so familiar and unsettling – like meeting someone you love after they come back from a long journey wearing differently-colored eyes. Like if H.P. Lovecraft had had a hand in writing The Book of Common Prayer. It’s playful, and frightening, and truer, somehow, than the original.”

—Mallory Ortberg, Author of Texts from Jane Eyre

Come for the Michael Landon Flip Book; stay for the richly rewoven story that excavates hidden moments in Little House on the Prairie and pays playful homage to fan favorites like prairie bitch Nellie Oleson. Little is a new classic, skillfully foraging Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much-loved series to create an (ir)reverent rereading that pioneers the new frontier of Little House on the Prairie in the 21st-century.

—Alison Fraser, Author of Animalia

Emily Anderson’s writing has appeared recently in Harper’s, Conjunctions, and Fence. She often collaborates with visual artists; video work created with Jen Morris has been screened in Vermont, Philadelphia, and Spain. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University at Buffalo.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 158 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-132-0

$25

Little- Novels by Emily And… by Geoffrey Gatza

Wexelblatt’s book is laden with wit, with wry observations, gentle sarcasm, and wicked ironies. It always has just enough laughter to keep its characters (and the reader) from spinning off into the abysses.
-Fred Marchant, review of Life in the Temperate Zone in Harvard Book Review

Wexelblatt constructs rich stories that make heavy subjects dance weightlessly before the reader’s eyes.
-Review of The Decline of Our Neighborhood, Publishers Weekly

Wexelblatt should no more be let loose behind a typewriter than in front of a classroom. Students might begin to think.
-Donald Wayne Viney, review of Professors at Play in The Midwest Quarterly

Madness be blessed, if it brings us the overflow of wisdom and of love that falls from Wexelblatt and fills his Sidney Fein.
-Ricardo Nirenberg, review of The Posthumous Papers of Sidney Fein in Offcourse Literary Journal

Thought-provoking, entertaining and eloquent. . . you can’t help but marvel at Wexelblatt’s ability to move and enchant in just a few concise pages This inspired and truly original story collection is an exquisite joy, offering the equivalent beauty and charm a fine symphony might accomplish.
-Nicholas Litchfield, review of Petites Suites in Colorado Review

Robert Wexelblatt’s new collection displays formal mastery, lucid exposition, and a sure way of stimulating the reader’s curiosity. Characters and situations raise questions, some to be answered, others to be left widening into further mystery.
– Sarah White, review of Heiberg’s Twitch in American Book Review

Wexelblatt’s Hsi-wei Tales is a wonderful fusion of poetry and prose that captivates and holds nuggets of wisdom far beyond the fortune cookie kind. . . . a collection worthy of praise and preservation.
– Nicholas Litchfield, review of Hsi-wei Tales in Colorado Review

ROBERT WEXELBLATT is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published seven fiction collections, Life in the Temperate Zone, The Decline of Our Neighborhood, The Artist Wears Rough Clothing, Heiberg’s Twitch, Petites Suites, Intuition of the News, and Hsi-wei Tales; two books of essays, Professors at Play and The Posthumous Papers of Sidney Fein; two short novels, Losses and The Derangement of Jules Torquemal; two books of verse, Fifty Poems and Girl Asleep; essays, stories, and poems in a variety of scholarly and literary journals, and the novel Zublinka Among Women, awarded the Indie Book Awards first prize for fiction.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 312 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-379-9

$22

The Thirteenth Studebaker b… by BlazeVOX [books]

Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.

The layers of complexity in Cris Mazza’s work never cease to amaze. Yet to Come is a drama of yearning and dissatisfaction, obsession and dysfunction, love and hunger and music and the kinds of lies we tell ourselves and others, all the way down. A love story, a family saga, a narrative of “parallel perditions,” as one of the characters says, Yet to Come is a quintessentially American story, a history of the decades told in stinging dialogue and rich internal narrative, in postcards and journals and multiple layers of how we communicate, and how we can’t. The scenes from an unhappy marriage are some of the most compelling, hurtful, and true I’ve ever read. Dip in, you’ll be pulled along in a narrative that reveals itself in layers, unfolds itself subtly, lingers in the mind long after the book is closed.

—Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah and Kind of Kin

The formal experimentation of the book’s various textual attacks, its graphicness, its collaged nature, and its over-the-topness. make it a kind of opera, staking a claim for a kind of super- or neo-realism, overly rich as if it were a map more detailed than the thing it represents.

—Michael Martone, author of The Moon over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond, and Memoranda

Cris Mazza is a master at depicting the ways the past haunts us. In YET TO COME, Cal’s half-life of regret poignantly and at times painfully reminds us of the agency in our own lives, even in the face of closed doors. Never one to reduce complex human beings to stereotypes, Mazza also reveals here the way intimacy complicates gender dynamics beyond the easy ways we so often see portrayed in the media.

—Rob Roberge, author of More Than They Could Chew, and Drive

Yet to Come is another fine example of Cris Mazza’s skill, craft, and complex take on a world that is only now catching up to her. Like watching a fireball explode over and over again on auto-repeat, reading Mazza’s prose offers the experience of feeling luminous heat while looking for protective eyewear that never quite does the job. There’s no protection, but there is always the hope that protection is always to be found deep inside her immensely powerful language.

—Davis Schneiderman, author of DIS, and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game

Cris Mazza has seventeen other titles of fiction and literary nonfiction including her last book, Charlatan: New and Selected Stories, covering her 20 years of authoring short fiction. Other notable titles include Something Wrong With Her, a real-time memoir; her first novel How to Leave a Country, which won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction; and the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She is a native of Southern California and director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 328 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-349-2

$18

Yet to Come by Cris Mazza Book Preview

Chuck Richardson writes like he’s the conductor of a chorus of demons. Hallucinatory and searing, Iterations of Lilith and Adam pounds away at your equilibrium until your only choice is to let go, accept your fate, and let Richardson be your guide. I tore through this book and my only disappointment occurred when the music stopped when I had read the last word. Take a chance on a book that is original in both thought and structure and you’ll be rewarded with an experience you likely won’t soon forget.

—Dave Megenhardt, author of Dogs in the Cathedral and North of Portsmouth

Reading Chuck Richardson will help your eyes grow muscles. His novel Iterations of Lilith and Adam: An Alien’s Memoir is ripping with the urgent juxtapositions of words and images not normally seen together, and the effect is not only disarming, but devastating. His characters are tethered together and meet in painful collisions that cannot be turned away from. They make each other pawns in one another’s games, but (or because), as Richardson says, “If you refused your pawnship, you were dangerous.” Richardson’s is a taut prose that captures the exigencies of modern life with honesty, and thus, with pain both administered and received. Sentences such as “If I had a hole in my chest you’d want to poke your finger in it” and “Boxing her in liberated him” slap the reader into attention and, at key moments, into wide-eyed alarm. The prose is every bit as relentlessly intense and driving as the work of Celine or Artaud. Wow! Respect!

—Eckhard Gerdes, author of the novels Marco & Iarlaith: A Novel in Flash Fictions and White Bungalows, and publisher at Journal of Experimental Fiction

Chuck Richardson parodies porn capitalism with its objectification, obsession with body parts, and inability to consider the whole person. Assembly-line sex, incest, and violence mark a world where characters look for religious transcendence through taboo-breaking debauchery. Richardson writes this terrifying, funny and excessive novel with precision and economy. A bracing, and too-real read.

—Jefferson Hansen, author of 100 Hybrids

Chuck Richardson is the author of several books of fiction and poetry from BlazeVOX.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 256 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-345-4

Iterations of Lilith and Adam- An Alien’s Memoir by Chuck Richardson Book Preview

The Sunsphere is a 266-foot-tall green truss structure topped by a gold glass sphere that was built as the symbol of the 1982 World’s Fair (also known as the Knoxville International Energy Exposition). Actually, the Sunsphere stands 6,520 feet tall and is composed of a black, cylindrical base capped by a miniature neutron star. Well, the Sunsphere Shot Tower, made entirely of brick, manufactures shot for shotguns. But then, the Sunsphere is 1,000 feet tall and composed of a green tower and a pulsing orb of blue lightning. Really, the Sunsphere is dilapidated, covered in tarps, and likely to be torn down soon. Or maybe, Sunsphere Ziggurat is a massive conceptual art installation constructed by an underground organization called the KnoxVillains. Certainly, Sunsphere, a collection of nine formally innovative fictions, focuses on characters obsessed with ideas of energy and entropy, focuses on characters who are trying to figure out how to continue on in a world that is falling apart, who are trying to learn how to act in a world that is constantly changing. In the face of social collapse, some characters find solace in the logic of puzzles, in the conventions of art, in outdated ideas of empire and romance, in the lure of pop culture, in academia and politics. But at the core of this collection is a search for humanity, even when the very atmosphere appears to demand the inhumane.

This brilliantly satirical and playfully experimental collection upends all expectations—Sunsphere is the perfect book for our absurdist times. Each story is a new philosophical labyrinth of delicious, Barthelme-style surprises. Don a pair of ironic (or earnest!) sunglasses, and enjoy this incredible book.

—Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa and Made for Love

How does the brain think about itself? The brainy Andrew Farkas answers endlessly in this crazed, cracked, creased collection of flipped-out origami, folding and unfolding fictions, Sunsphere, mapping the Borgesian brouhaha of seismic self-consciousness on steroids. These zesty vest-pocket labyrinths are tingling Tinguely machines—kinetic, corpuscular, cornucopic—saturated with negated negative spaces, foiled and foiling, as they tear themselves and all of us-es apart.

—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Brooding and The Moon Over Wapakoneta

Andrew Farkas is the author of two short fiction collections: Sunsphere (BlazeVOX Books) and Self-Titled Debut (Subito Press), and a novel: The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press). His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, Western Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, including one Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXV and one Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2013. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.F.A. from the University of Alabama, an M.A. from the University of Tennessee, and a B.A. from Kent State University. He is a fiction editor for The Collagist and an Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 232 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-324-9

Sunsphere by Andrew Farkas

‘A consistently interesting writer’ – Dermot Bolger

Leaving his lover, a man driving into the desert encounters a woman walking barefoot towards him on the Interstate. Is she fleeing an accident, or something worse? A salaryman, recalling his lost love, finds himself alone in the icy winter. An artist spots an unusual stain on his ceiling, coming from the apartment upstairs. Does he dare investigate? The elegant novella ‘Anhedonia’ traces the key moments of a relationship from its first hilarious meeting to its wistful final fading – seen through the eyes of a character incapable of feeling joy.

These nine stories of love and its opposite, blend darkness, humor and a refreshing emotional openness. Briskly written and told with a winning humanity, Anhedonia is a fine collection from one of Ireland’s most exciting writers.

Patrick Chapman was born in 1968 in Ireland. His books include The Wow Signal (stories, 2007), The Negative Cutter (novellas, 2014), and So Long, Napoleon Solo (novel, 2017). His poetry collections are Jazztown (1991), The New Pornography (1996), Breaking Hearts and Traffic Lights (2007), A Shopping Mall on Mars (2008), The Darwin Vampires (2010), A Promiscuity of Spines: New & Selected Poems (2012), Slow Clocks of Decay (2016) and Open Season on the Moon (2019). He has written audio dramas for Doctor Who and Dan Dare; a short film; and much television for children. For BBC Radio 4 he produced B7’s 2014 dramatisation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. With Dimitra Xidous he edits an online poetry magazine, The Pickled Body.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 190 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-335-5

Anhedonia by Patrick Chapman Book Preview