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Recommended Books:
Our hardworking slaves staff highly recommend the following books:
1978
by Daniel Jones
Toronto, 1978. Kid, Soo and Jacky, members of the punk rock band Cerebral Paisley, have just found out that Keith Moon is dead. He's actually been dead for a couple of months, but they've been out of the loop for a while now, drunk and dealing with relationship problems. (Soo and Kid used to go out until Soo decided she was a dyke and dumped him for Jacky.) Now they're busy getting ready for their first--and what will end up being their last--show.
Publisher: Rush Hour Revisions
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
A Very Funny Fellow
by Donald Lev
Donald Lev's latest book, A Very Funny Fellow, published by NYQ Books, is a compilation of ninety-two short poems, mostly written over the last decade and a half, and appearing in periodicals.
Publisher: NYQ Books
Recommended by Rebecca Schumejda,
Austin Nights
by Michael Davidson
In Austin Nights, the journey Michael and Bridget take as they abandon the subtropical ocean climate for landlocked central Texas demands optimism and a sense of adventure after the death of Michael’s grandparents.
List Price: 13 Publisher: tiny toe press
Recommended by J. A. Tyler,
Bad Attitude
by Leopold McGinnis
I can't get a job because I have no experience. I have no experience, because I work at Electronics Pit.
Bad Attitude follows the story of Jesse Durnell, a nihilistic optimist, in his ongoing attempts to get fired from his current job as a Sales Associate at the retail giant Electronics Pit. Jesse battles secret shoppers, sales training, overeager coworkers and customers in his glorious quest to get fired. Bad Attitude is a subversive romp through the modern day McJob, poking merciless fun at consumer culture, retail practices and the drive to succeed.
Publisher: Underground Uprising Press
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
badbadbad
by Jesus Angel Garcia
When his wife inexplicably flees from home with their infant son, Jesús Ángel García struggles to redefine himself by being of service on both sides of the Southern cultural divide. By day, he works as the humble, God-fearing webmaster for First Church of the Church Before Church. At night, he plays the part of sexual messiah on fallenangels, an online social network for extreme desires. Blinded by righteousness, obsession and identity confusion, Jesús refuses to change his path even as it leads to the greatest of sins.
List Price: 14.95 Publisher: New Pulp Press
Recommended by Robert Kloss,
Breakfast and a Cigarette: A Novella in Four Directions
by Bill McLaughlin
List Price: 9.95 Publisher: CreateSpace
Recommended by Michele McDannold,
Coming WorldGone World: The Abomunauts Are Coming to Piss on Your Lawn
by Paul Corman-Roberts
Socially and politically activist poems, humorous, dark, incisive and critical of the hucksterism of the American political landscape.
Publisher: Brave New World Order Books
Recommended by Nescher Pyscher,
Damascus
by Joshua Mohr
"[Mohr] has a generous understanding of his characters, whom he describes with an intelligence and sensitivity that pulls you in."—The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice) on Termite Parade
It's 2003 and the country is divided evenly for and against the Iraq War. Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco's Mission District, becomes the unlikely setting for a showdown between the opposing sides.
Tensions come to a boil when Owen, the bar's proprietor who has recently taken to wearing a Santa suit full-time, agrees to host the joint's first (and only) art show by Sylvia Suture, an ambitious young artist who longs to take her act to the dramatic precipice of the high-wire by nailing live fish to the walls as a political statement.
An incredibly creative and fully rendered cast of characters orbit the bar. There's No Eyebrows, a cancer patient who has come to the Mission to die anonymously; Shambles, the patron saint of the hand job; Revv, a lead singer who acts too much like a lead singer; and Owen, donning his Santa costume to mask the most unfortunate birthmark imaginable.
Damascus is the place where confusion and frustration run out of room to hide. By gracefully tackling such complicated topics as cancer, Iraq, and issues of self-esteem, Joshua Mohr has painted his most accomplished novel yet.
Joshua Mohr is the San Francisco Chronicle best-selling author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me and Termite Parade, a New York Times Book Review editors' choice selection.
List Price: 16 Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Recommended by Robert Kloss,
Enjoy the Journey
by Giridhar Veeramaneni
A collection of 23 enjoyable and humourous short stories about an Indian immigrant living in Toronto. Topics cover everything from old world superstition and class to new world marriage and toonie-tuesdays. Hear from Sheshu the Philosopher, journey through call centres, phone date lines, dance with superstitious grandmas and more. The story Arranged Marriage is quite an interesting look at the pros and cons of both Indian and Western style ways of finding partners. A highly enjoyable, unpretentious collection.
You can read three of the stories included in Enjoy the Journey here on Red Fez: Sheshu the Philosopher, Found by the Sheppard and Dancing Grandmas.
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
by Johannes Göransson
List Price: 14 Publisher: Tarpaulin Sky Press
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
Fog Gorgeous Stag
by Sean Lovelace
Like wrangling elastic flamingoes and dyspeptic hedgehogs around wondrous croquet pitches, like rolling bocce with hair-triggered hand-grenades in a downpour of jazz-scatting jarts, Sean Lovelace’s wondrous Fog Gorgeous Stag staggers a mere mortal’s imagination with the sheer dervished dervish tattooed on the triumphant tympanic page, the centripetal paragraphs parachuting marginal corridors of ruin, and the Rorschaching sentences slicing through the winded wind-sheer of everything, everything going everywhere fast. This is prose that out-Jesuses poetry’s poetry. Reading it is to engage in the interval training of the syntaxes. The pant panting! The hypoxic breathlessness! The all of it that is the all of it!
List Price: 12 Publisher: Publishing Genius Press
Recommended by J. A. Tyler,
From Old Notebooks
by Evan Lavender-Smith
List Price: 16 Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
Recommended by Michael Filippone,
Game Quest
by Leopold McGinnis
Set just before the monumental rise of the Internet, Game Quest follows Madre, the world's most famous garage-born, family-run computer gaming company, as it struggles to survive the computer gaming boom of the mid 90s. Crushed under the weight of their own success, pinched on one side by a market flood of cheap knock-offs of their signature Adventure Games and pinched on the other by the new breed of 3D action shooters, Madre further finds itself under hostile takeover. Game Quest follows over 20 characters as they struggle through the cut-throat world of big business and asks the question, do you become the enemy you hate to survive? Or stick to the simple ways that have served you so well, and fail?
Some characters you'll meet: Art Loel, creator of the world's first and most popular adult-rated computer games, Kendra Roberts, infamous woman game designer who believes the the evil characters of the competition's games are out to kill her. Meet Heather, member of the world's fist all-female deathmatch clan! And many, many more.
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Recommended by Paul Corman-Roberts,
long past the presence of common
by j/j hastain
"In words that reflect the dynamic complexities of language and human relationships, in lines cascading across pages, challenging the limitations of thinking in terms of duality and revealing an understanding beyond linguistic polarity, j/j hastain wants 'to show / the way that these languages are inherently / slanted / uncountable / yet worth lifetimes of attempt' and does just that. Like tongues coming together in the primal quest for contact, hastain's poetry is the experience of connecting, of breaking fabricated boundaries and going to the source--an essential voice for humanity in an increasingly isolating world." --Ed Go "Full saturation "inverse -embedded wishes" surface and recede in long pas the presence of common, a momentous document which activates a commons for future feeling. This book radicalizes conceptions of the body multiple. Erotic subjects in the form of psycho-somatic wishes surge, intensify, electrify, vacillate, flicker, morph, fume, commingle and melt. This is emancipatory writing. Note too the ecstasy of the viscous embryonic circuitry arc bubble collages which are interspersed throughout. I feel an incredible kinship with this book." --Brenda Iijima "Our bodies render us travelers, or prisoners, and on this truth is born j/j hastain's fascinating new book long past the presence of common. Naming and triangulating are important passions in this work, which often surprises with its multiple vocabularies, even as it refreshes age old debates about the systems of logic and gender that have made a nightmare of the political experience. If you are looking for a book of avant-garde poetry with a revolutionary dimension, you will do well to take this book to heart." --Kevin Killian
List Price: 12 Publisher: Interbirth Books / Say It with Stones
Recommended by J. A. Tyler,
Louis Riel
by Chester Brown
A classical comic re-telling of Canada's greatest anti-establishment hero!
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions
by Norman Lock
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Recommended by J. A. Tyler,
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
by Charles Bukowski
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
Road Signs: A Story of Practical Magic
by Jay Archer David
A sublime spiritual journey, one that explores the possibilities in the questions
Somewhere More Holy: Stories from a Bewildered Father, Stumbling Husband, Reluctant Handyman, and Prodigal Son
by Tony Woodlief
Beautiful stories of a family born in tragedy and being reborn each new day
The Chocolate War
by Robert Cormier
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
The Hunger Season
by William Taylor Jr.
Poetry
List Price: 15 Publisher: sunnyoutside
Recommended by Nescher Pyscher,
The Journal of Albion Moonlight
by Kenneth Patchen
Publisher: New Directions
Recommended by Paul Corman-Roberts,
The Museum of Eterna's Novel
by Macedonio Fernandez
The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel) is the very definition of a novel written ahead of its time. Macedonio (known to everyone by his unusual first name) worked on this novel in the 1930s and early '40s, during the heyday of Argentine literary culture, and around the same time that At Swim-Two-Birds was published, a novel that has quite a bit in common with Macedonio's masterpiece.
List Price: 14.95 Publisher: Open Letter
Recommended by Michele McDannold,
The Orange Suitcase
by Joseph Riippi
In the 34 stories filling THE ORANGE SUITCASE, Joseph Riippi packs an intimate and powerful portrait of a young man’s life. From a childhood spent snipering neighbours with BB guns, to adulthood grasping at love and art in New York City, THE ORANGE SUITCASE shows us not only the way life is lived but – perhaps more importantly – how it is remembered.
List Price: 14.95 Publisher: Ampersand Books
The Other Side of Ourselves
by Rob Taylor
The Other Side of Ourselves, Rob Taylor’s debut collection of award-winning poems, explores the real and imagined worlds of our everyday lives. Mysterious without denying clear images, plain spoken without being plain, if there is an ongoing Cold War between modern poetry and the general reading public, Taylor’s poems are defiantly Non-Aligned. They promote a middle path where complexity does not trump simple pleasure, and pleasure gives way willingly to moments of insight and grace.
List Price: 18 Publisher: Cormorant Books Inc
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus
by Wred Fright
Half-writer, half-professor, half-garage rocker Wred Fright's first novel. Popularly serialized as a zine, The Pornographic, Flabberghasted Emus follows the non-success story of Theodorable, George Jah, Funnybear and Alexander Depot, a housemate-membered garage band, as they fail to acheive anything significant but rock on anyway!
Publisher: ULA Press
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
The Red Fez
by Leopold McGinnis
Ever wonder where the name of this site comes from? No? Well it comes from this 80 page, illustrated, lit-noir novella.
When a mysterious artifact, looted from the Algerian desert by French occupiers, goes missing, a thief-eat-thief bonanza ensues over final possession. Enter four characters who all feel morally entitled to the prize: Habibi Al Adiz - the mustachio waxing professional theif, Pierre Rensard - Algiers' begrudging Cheif of Police, Sylvia Longshot - ex-pat English gun-runner-come-suspected-husband-murderer, and Savid - proprietor of the local underground gambling establishment. A little bit Casablanca, a little bit who-dunnit and a whole lot of entertainment.
Publisher: Underground Uprising Press
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William L. Shirer
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Recommended by Paul Corman-Roberts,
The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree
by Kevin Pilkington
These are Manhattan poems, down-and-out poems, looking-for-a-job poems, regarding the world from a street corner poems.
List Price: 14 Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Recommended by Michele McDannold,
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
by Patrick Somerville
List Price: 10.21 Publisher: Featherproof Books
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
by Scott McCloud
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Recommended by RW Watkins,
Unfinished: stories finished
by Lily Hoang
Award-winning author Lily Hoang invited some of the top innovative writers in the U.S. to submit unfinished stories that she then completed over the course of one summer. Although Hoang attempted to follow each respective writer's style, the stories are distinctly her own, resulting in a mesmerizing and highly entertaining collection. Unfinished stories were donated by Kate Bernheimer, Blake Butler, Beth Couture, Debra Di Blasi, Justin Dobbs, Trevor Dodge, Zach Dodson, Brian Evenson, Scott Garson, Carol Guess, Elizabeth Hildreth, John Madera, Ryan Manning, Michael Martone, Kelcey Parker, Ted Pelton, Kathleen Rooney, Davis Schneiderman, Michael Stewart, and J.A. Tyler. Unfinished cover and interior art was donated by notable and naive artists, then finished by artist and gallery curator, Anne Austin Pearce.
List Price: 49 Publisher: Jaded Ibis Press
Recommended by Michele McDannold,
Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea
by Leopold McGinnis
Crafting wings out of wax and poems from the underground, Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea is a dreamlike voyage through poetic narrative format, blurring the line between poetry and fiction. Exploring the frenetic lives of Mexican cowboys, robots, sultans, Greek gods, and convenience store clerks, Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea shatters preconceived notions of poetry and instead offers a more accessible strain of literary free flow.
List Price: 16.95 Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Recommended by Leopold McGinnis,
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