Blink and the World Goes Blank - Filbert Conroy (On Lives Press)

The unnamed protagonist of Filbert Conroy’s Blink and the World Goes Blank can be found in cramped apartments, on dates, on trains, on subway platforms, and wandering around other unremarkable places. Not much is known about this mysterious character except that he may in fact be you. This collection of microfiction is told through the second person narrative, lending it an oddly instructive voice (“You just woke up. Sitting on the edge of your bed, the sunlight bathes your bare legs.”)

Devising these stories as if they’re happening to the reader in real time is an odd choice, but it succeeds based on the relatable nature of Blink’s content. One becomes immersed as they wait for a train, remember sitting in a high chair as a toddler, contract food poisoning on a bus, try to fall in love, avoid a bum, have nightmares, and attempt to cry after a long drought. In these 56 infectious passages, Conroy’s narrator injures himself, falls ill, makes poor choices, and we can only laugh knowing we have done the same.

For 17 years, Filbert Conroy worked in Utica, NY at a shoe factory. As was the trend in those times (the 1980's), the factory shut down. A decade or two wandered by and Conroy realized that shoes were not the only thing he knew something about; he'd always had a soft spot for books.

This book was edited by Mike Parish, author of Subway Supplement (On Lives Press) and a forthcoming fiction collection (On Lives Press).

About On Lives Press
On Lives Press puts out material you can take wherever you go. We enjoy making little books that you can carry in the inside pocket of your smoking jacket (if you have one), or misplace under the seat of your car (if you have a place like that), or do whatever other imaginary action or set of actions you want with them (if you want to). Hopefully, at some point along the way, you'll wind up reading our books, too.

Filbert Conroy: Blink and the World Goes Blank
microfiction collection
36 pages, paperback
$3.00 direct/$5.00 in stores

related links:
- microfiction
- books with black/white cover

Snail - V. Ulea (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink)

Formed from memories of dreams of memories, Snail is journey of life, introspection, and familial connectitude. Its seven interconnected stories are bonded by mood, plot, a single set of characters, and heart felt emotion; yet separated in a very dream like fashion by time, space, and logic of reality. Beautifully adorned by the artworks of Irene Frenkel, this book is not simply a work to be read and considered, it is a texturized and exhilarating cosmic dance for all the senses

"The stories slip effortlessly and seamlessly from reality to fantasy and back. These made me wonder, for example, whether there is a fairy tale in Russian literature or in Russian folklore regarding the snail, or one (or more) regarding the relationship between mothers and grandmothers, etc." - Harvey Stanbrough

V. Ulea (Vera Zubarev) is a bilingual Russian-English poet, writer, scholar and film director. She has published 14 books of poetry, prose, and literary criticism. She teaches classes on Decision Making in Chess, Literature and Film in the University of Pennsylvania

About Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink
Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink is an independent literary press dedicated to publishing avant-garde, experimental or otherwise unique fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and book art with general idealities similar to those found in absurdism, expressionism, futurism, irrealism, magic-realism, metaphysics and/or surrealism. Our books are richly intelligent and imaginative in their context, and curiously stimulating in the multi-layered subtext and potential interpretations.

V. Ulea: Snail
story collection
94 pages, $19.80
ISBN: 978-1926617060

48 Hour Magazine - issue zero: Hustle

"On May 7th the editors of 48 Hour Magazine announced a theme for the debut issue: Hustle. Interested writers and artists had 24 hours to produce and submit work. The next 24 hours were for the editorial team to "snip, mash and gild" the best submissions until they had a magazine. At the end of that period, the magazine was available for purchase at MagCloud. And it's beautiful." - Utne Reader

"We made 48HR Magazine over one weekend in May. From noon on May 7th through noon on the 9th, a team circled up around the original Rolling Stone conference table in Mother Jones' offices to transform 1,502 submissions from around the world into a chorus of voices, all harmonizing around the same theme: hustle. 48 Hour Magazine features 60 pages of writers and artists from your favorite magazines sharing space with previously unpublished new talent, shaped by some of the best editors in the business. You're going to love it." -The Editors

About 48 Hour Magazine
48 Hour Magazine is a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits. As the name suggests, the concept is to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days. No long commitments. No pitches. No grinding editing process.
A representative sample of "Hustle" is available online: Selections from Issue Zero.

48 Hour Magazine - "Hustle"
60 pages
$10

American Junkie - Tom Hansen (Emergency)

American Junkie is the story of Hansen's life as a musician and heroin dealer during the punk and grunge movements in Seattle. It's American. It’s human underground.

If you’ve ever wondered why people do drugs even when it’s killing them and they know it, this book will help you understand. And if you think that all junkies are nothing but degenerates, then this book will change your mind.

In American Junkie, Tom Hansen takes us non-stop into a land of desperate addicts, failed punk bands, and brushes with sad fame. It’s a story that takes us from the promise of a young life to the prison of a mattress, from budding musician to broken down junkie, and ultimately, a ride to a hospital for a six-month stay and a painful self-discovery that cuts down to the bone.

Tom Hansen lives in Seattle and writes for The Nervous Breakdown. He is also an editor at Knock Magazine. His next reading is in New York on May 22nd.

About Emergency Press
Emergency Press is based in New York and publishes explorative books of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and emergent forms that fall outside traditional categories. Emergency Press books are available in bookstores across the nation and through major online booksellers. Every year, the press hosts an international contest for book-length examinations of a single topic. Their next book is a story collection called Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello (more).

Tom Hanson: American Junkie
biography
280 pages, paperback, 15$
ISBN: 978-0975362365

McSweeney's Best American/National Magazine Award Bundle

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern publishes on a roughly quarterly schedule, and each issue is markedly different from its predecessors in terms of design and editorial focus.

Stories of the issues 30 and 32—"Memory Wall," by Anthony Doerr, "Raw Water," by Wells Tower, and "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events," by Kevin Moffett—have brought home a National Magazine Award:
"National Magazine Award 2010 FICTION - Recognizes excellence in fiction published in magazines - Winner: McSweeney’s Quarterly: Dave Eggers, Editor for “Memory Wall,” by Anthony Doerr, October 1; “Raw Water,” by Wells Tower, October 1; “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events,” by Kevin Moffett; March 3"

In addition, both Kevin Moffett's and Wells Tower's stories, as well as Jim Shepard's "The Netherlands Lives With Water," have been selected for the 2010 edition of the Best American Short Stories.

To mark the event, McSweeney's has bundled issues 30 and 32 together at a special price, and has put the award-winning stories online.

About McSWEENEY'S
McSweeney’s began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected by other magazines. But after the first issue, the journal began to publish pieces primarily written with McSweeney’s in mind. Today, McSweeney’s has grown to be one of the country’s best-read and widely-circulated literary journals, with an expanding subscriber base and strong independent bookstore following. As a small publishing house, McSweeney’s is committed to finding new voices — Gabe Hudson, Paul Collins, Neal Pollack, J.T. Leroy, John Hodgman, Amy Fusselman, Salvador Plascencia and Sean Wilsey are among those whose early work appeared in McSweeney’s—and promoting the work of gifted but underappreciated writers, such as Lydia Davis and Stephen Dixon.

McSweeney's Best American/National Magazine Award Bundle
Product Code: BABDL
click here to read "The Netherlands Lives With Water" by Jim Shepard
Regular Price: $39.00
Sale Price: $26.00

Letters Patterns Structures - Andrew Topel (avantacular)

In Letters Patterns Structures, Andrew Topel treats his viewers to an architectural purity in which positive and negative spaces become interchangeable. These precise arrangements of letters and punctuation build forms that function equally as lattice works of theory, as finite sculptures, and as art. Topel ‘s craftsmanship locates and then captures the richness of individual angles superimposed on one another, yielding large, musical constructs that undergo successive phases of preparation, suspension, and resolution.

"Andrew Topel’s hand is sure, his eye is clear, his vision, superb. Within these creations, delicacy and boldness are not incompatible, but progress through mutually celebratory elements within successive pieces. When viewing Topel’s art, I do not have to work at loving what I see and feel. My admiration is inevitable. His masterful constructions enhance my own capacity for sensory awareness, melding discoveries that inform each new moment of joy in finding what is present and continually reconfiguring itself into conceptual possibilities that hold, for all their majesty, within a greater actuality space." - Sheila E. Murphy

About avantacular press
Andrew Topel founded avantacular press in 2002. The press specializes in books of visual poetry & other-stream writing as well as one-of-a-kind artists books.

Andrew Topel: Letters Patterns Structures
visual poetry collection
paperback, 50 pages + after words by Geof Huth
$12, which includes shipping

Tinkers - Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary)

Harding's short novel Tinkers is the story of a dying man, George Washington Crosby, and his relationship with his father, who suffered from epilepsy and eventually abandoned his family because of the affliction.

Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the past week. This is the first time a book published by a small independent press has won the Pulitzer for fiction since 1981 - back then, John Kennedy Toole posthumoulsly won the award for his picaresque novel A Confederacy of Dunces, published by Grove Press.

Paul Harding studied at the University of Massachusettes from 1986 to 1992 while drumming in the grunge band Cold Water Flat. Tinkers is his first novel. An interview with Paul Harding is up in Open Source: Paul Harding's Magical Tinkers.

About Bellevue Literary Press
Bellevue Literary Press, founded in 2005, publishes literary and authoritative fiction and nonfiction at the nexus of the arts and the sciences, with a special focus on medicine. Their authors explore cultural and historical representations of the human body, illness, and health, and address the impact of scientific and medical practice on the individual and society. The mission of Bellevue Literary Press is to bring together medicine, science, and humanism through literature: "The common starting point for understanding most things is a story.”

Paul Harding: Tinkers
novel
paperback, 192 pages, $14.95

The HiStory of Santa Monica - Michael J. Atwood (Aqueous)

Michael J. Atwood's debut collection is thematically linked by both the characters—who are struggling to realize their Hollywood dreams and the setting—Santa Monica, California. A seemingly peaceful seaside city, Santa Monica is also a purgatory where the characters must face failure and loss—as well as their demons and ghosts. Family and ritual are consistent motifs throughout the collection, as are the themes of escape, addiction, redemption, reparation, religion, and death. Whether it is a young couple looking to buy their first home or a man returning to his hometown for a funeral or a baptism, readers will find the everyday rituals in these stories identifiable in many ways.

Michael J. Atwood is a fiction writer and weekly opinion columnist for the North Attleborough Free Press. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and online journals.

About Aqueous Books
Aqueous Books is the print arm of Prick of the Spindle, an online literary quarterly journal also available as a Kindle magazine. Staff include Prick of the Spindle Editor-in-Chief Cynthia Reeser as Publisher, and Prick of the Spindle Managing Editor Erin McKnight as Editor. Upcoming books include novels and novellas published serially on Prick of the Spindle, as well as works of literary merit, memoirs, magical realism, and speculative fiction. Look for forthcoming publications by Heather Fowler, Alec Bryan, Mel Bosworth, and others.

The HiStory of Santa Monica
short-story collection, thematically linked
190 pages, paperback, $14
ISBN: 978-0-9826734-0-9
pre-order now at Aqueous Books / Store, and safe shipping costs.

Gaze - Marthe Reed (Black Radish)

In the de-stabilized intersection of fashion, the war on terror, and cultural constructions of the feminine, Gaze explores the resulting tensions in a series of dichotomies central to an increasingly isolate and adversarial condition: Christianity/Islam, ancient/modern, sacred/secular, sexuality/spirituality, feminism/fundamentalism, power/resistance, self/other.
Rikki Ducornet says this about these intersections in Gaze: “In these moments the world is given breath, heat, and voice. All at once it approaches, and the beloved's unfettered body is revealed as the antidote to tyranny.” What we see and what we fail to see are constantly juxtaposed, exposing a flawed desire to “become.” Kate Bernheimer says of Gaze, “Too beautiful to articulate’—dressed, undressed, terrorized, and entrancing. These unveilings, these poems, how they haunt me. Riding Angela Carter on a poetry-horse, Reed hallucinates language with certain and dissolving rhythm. Gaze at them; go blind inside this mentalist’s mind. Marthe Reed is unrelenting, unrelentingly kind.”

Marthe Reed’s publications include Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink) and two chapbooks (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations (Dusie Kollektiv). Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, MiPoesias, Exquisite Corpse, and Big Bridge, and is forthcoming from Ekleksographia and Fairy Tale Review.

About Black Radish Books
Black Radish Books was founded as a collective in 2009. Our editorial focus is to publish and promote innovative writing. Because we operate as a collective, our goal is to allow members to dictate the aesthetic. As such, our bent is best described as eclectic, with focus on the difficult and the surprising. Black Radish Books has two other books forthcoming this spring: Occultations by David Wolach, and Spectre by Mark Lamoureux. This summer look for The Incompossible by Carrie Hunter, Herso,- An Heirship in Waves by Susana Gardner, and The Dead Love Everyone by Jared Hayes. Ten more volumes of poetry are in the pipeline, coming out later this year and 2011.

Marthe Reed: Gaze
Poetry collection
94 pages; paperback; price $15.00
ISBN 978-0-9825731-0-5

In This Alone Impulse - Shya Scanlon (Noemi)

Show me how to look forward to these things. To see them and pursue. It is something to bark like a dog barks. It is something to wade in the snow like a chicken, lost. My hands don’t feel their fingers, and so my answers come but do not grasp the reason for their caring. Still they care. They take long baths and watch the mud run without spinning down a drain dead center between a world where I breathe under water, and a world where water is the substance of my skin....

"In This Alone Impulse bends syntax way back for maximum impact. Poetry or prose? You're reading." - Terese Svoboda

Shya Scanlon received an MFA from Brown University in 2008, where he won the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. His prose poetry collection In This Alone Impulse is now available for pre-orders, his novel Forecast - a serialized online project, more about it here: Project Forecast 42 - will be published by Flatmancrooked later in 2010.

About Noemi Press
Noemi Press is a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization based in Las Cruces, New Mexico, dedicated to publishing and promoting the work of emerging and established authors and artists. Forthcoming from Noemi Press are: Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies by Danielle Pafunda (poetry); Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneffand (fiction); Three Plays by Norman Lock (drama); and several chapbooks.

Shya Scanlon: In This Alone Impulse
prose poetry collection
72 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-934819-10-4

Indefinite Space 2010

Indefinite Space: Trees + bodies + minds, wilderness + birds, music—art, sea + sand compose the pages, as do situations, relationships, gardens, ghosts, and suns.

The 2010 edition of Indefinite Space contains work from 32 poets & artists: Aviva Englander Cristy, Felino Soriano, Jane Thompson, Ranjani Murali, Matina L. Stamatakis, Derek Henderson, Will Morris, Sarah Ahmad, Caitlyn Paley,
John Hocter, Kristen Ravel, Crag Hill, Doug Bolling, William Garvin, John Cross,
Nico Vassilakis, Ursula Ziegler, Kat Dixon, Talia Reed, Caitlin Johnson, Rebecca Mertz,
Guy R. Beining, Marina Blokker, Jeanne Shannon, Andrew Topel & Scott Helmes, Peter Layton, TWIXT,
David Spiering, Melissa Cannon, Dorothee Lang, and Matthew Joy.

Indefinite Space is edited by Marcia Arrieta, whose first chapbook experimental: was published by potes & poets press. Her second chapbook the curve against the linear is part of The Quartet Series— An Uncommon Accord, published by toadlily press. She has a MFA in poetry from Vermont College.

About Indefinite Space
Marcia Arrieta founded Indefinite Space in 1991 after receiving a grant for her work from the Pasadena Arts Council. She has continued to publish the journal independently for 18 years. Indefinite Space has a penchant for the avant-garde, the philosophical, the minimal (but not always), the natural, and the intangible.

Indefinite Space 2010
48 pages
single issue $7
ISSN 1075-6868