Fiction. In this fragmented, nontraditional narrative, debut author Joseph Riippi explores the aftermath of stories, rather than simply telling them: A music critic chants Susan Sontag quotes in a mental institution; a young girl looks to her starfish tattoo for regrowth; a disenchanted playwright flees divorce and human shrapnel. DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING! is the story of uncertainty in a new America, of three young people looking for peace and definitiveness in an increasingly shaky and volatile homeland.

Do Something! Do Something! Do Something!

Riippi, Joseph

Literature & Fiction

Ampersand Books

Poetry. Ryan Davidson's male protagonists are affable and messy as Charles Bukowski's, if only Bukowski left Los Angeles more often. From Hong Kong to Venice, Harlem to Belgrade, readers will be introduced to a string of love affairs: the Sarahs of many continents. In the vein of Tony Hoagland, Davidson's poems are tangential gestures that both tell a story and transcend the subject. The poems aren't just about the girls themselves, but where they fall in and out of place and time.

Under What Stars

Davidson, Ryan J

Poetry

Poetry. Loud, raucous, lively: J. Bradley's poetry is widely published and admired, and, in this, his first collection, he brings the full bore of his trademark poetic styling and larger-than-life imagery. Lust, love, contempt, digust, parental guidance, and poetic revenge, crafted with unbridled imagination and unmistakable skill. Bradley's poetry hearkens back to the times of childhood, when life was still interesting and imagination could bring cardboard boxes and discarded love affairs to life. DODGING TRAFFIC is equal parts laughter and loving insight.

Dodging Traffic

Bradley, J.

Fiction. At times both funny and heartbreaking, these nine emotionally rich and incisive stories follow characters grappling with the unanswerable question What next? A sudden encounter conjures a failed relationship. A minor league pitcher, in the twilight of a career that never was, tries to divine his future. A young man accompanies his veteran neighbor and father to a V.F.W. a few years after refusing to attend Annapolis. Stoicism and grit belie the vulnerability of people ultimately searching for someone or something to trust in. Though his literary forbearers may be Richard Ford and Ernest Hemingway, Adam Gallari reexamines the masculine with a deftness and a grace entirely his own.

We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now

Gallari, Adam

Short Stories & Anthologies

Poetry. Who's the queen of kundalini bloopers, Emily Dickinson's attitude problem (that bitch) and California dreams? It's Melissa Broder, who will charm your pants off and show you a little tough love in this vivid, witty first collection of poems. Each poem is artisan-crafted in controlled couplets, weighty triplets, tight syllabics and assonance that will take the top of your head off. But you won't have the time to absorb the academic monkeyshine—so absorbed you'll be on the flip side of Bat Mitzvah stress-syndrome, Aunt Sheila's in Taos, vampires in absentia, and brand names, brand names, brand names. From junkie fetishism to a housewife with a special "thing" for laundry, Broder does dark with magnetic charisma and enchanting humor.

When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother

Broder, Melissa

Fiction. In the thirty-four 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.

The Orange Suitcase

Fiction. Poetry. How many times can Super Mario die? Did Borges visit Indiana, or did Indiana visit Borges? Does the devil drink milk and, if not, why does he like milkmaids so much? And where do our hero turtles go when there are no more foot soldiers to fight? Welcome to RE: TELLING, the anthology that answers these burning questions, and many, many more. This collection of fiction, poetry, and art features some of the independent publishing world's favourite, most talented writers using recycled material: purloined plots, stolen settings, borrowed premises, and appropriated characters. It is subversion; it is homage. It is a ransacking of the treasure troves in our cultural basement, and nothing is off limits. The stories range from retellings of Shakespeare to Law & Order, from classical theater to video games. Each piece is something picked up and dusted off, reworked, and made new. Contributors are Matt Bell, Alicia Gifford, Michael Martone, Daniel Grandbois, Darcie Dennigan, Peter Connors, Jim Ruland, Samantha Hunt, Blake Butler, Tom La Farge, Shya Scanlon, Pedro Ponce, Crispin Best, Erin Fitzgerald, J. Bradley, Molly Gaudry, Steve Himmer, Josh Maday, Henry Jenkins, Michael Kimball, Corey Mesler, Roxane Gay, Timothy Gager, Heather Fowler, Joseph Riippi, Wendy Walker, Zachary Mason, Curtis Smith, Jeff Brewer, Kathleen Rooney and Lily Hoang, with original artwork by Teresa Buzzard.

Re: Telling

Fiction. Gathered here together are 22 of Garrett Socol's finely-crafted stories, by turns darkly humorous and light and zany, and often both at once. The characters populating these stories march slightly out-of-step with the world around them: a dentist, his hygienist, and their illicit flossing, a writer who publishes her own suicide handbook, a woman selling baked goods for electroshock therapy. In this collection, Socol brings his wry insight and sensitivity to bear on the madness of contemporary culture, the silliness of everyday life, and illustrates the many ways people, against all odds, keep themselves afloat.

Gathered Here Together

Socol, Garrett

Contemporary

Fiction. Inertia is a force, a powerful force, but it's not the only one. Courtney and Martin know all the words to all the songs on the mix tape of their lives. They have the cynical in-jokes down, the snide asides, the nonchalant pose. But beneath the practiced façade of self-satisfying ennui, these kids are staring down their futures, struggling in soured relationships with lovers and families, and finding out just what it takes to break out, if it's even possible. HERE IS HOW IT HAPPENS."Spencer Dew writes like a quiet maniac who sees the violence under the fa‡ade of everyday things, and the beauty under the violence. With X-ray vision and fine-tuned prose, Dew discovers insights and absurdities in the Americana of box stores, elite colleges, poetry students, buffet restaurants, historic plaques, alternative radio, conspiracy theorists, installation artists, and lug-headed drug experimentalists. HERE IS HOW IT HAPPENS explores the place where the heartland meets the rust belt meets the precarious bubble of academia, and finds redemption in the purity of longing and the shit coffee of an Amish country diner."—Karen Lillis

Here Is How It Happens

Dew, Spencer

This book starts out listening for bees, and hears none, the listener being something of a pupa in a cocoon on the early pages. Honeycombs begin not as sources of Swiftian sweetness and light, but sloughs of despond. Honeybees themselves, initially silent, burn like fire at the stake. The hive is the shadow of death, full of sand fleas that stand in for the desiderated insects, along with "scrubitch" mites, Hercules caterpillars and flies: electro-kinetic pellets flecking / blank walls. The planet and its atmosphere, thus un-beed, become a single organism whose surface swarms with flotsam, jetsam and scabs reincarnating as silverfish. Earth's innards comprise more non-beehives that pullulate instead with arachnids and microbes and single cells that Vincenz eventually nurtures to dinosaurhood. We get former human cultures who made hive-like arrangements: ...the Cucuteni-who incinerated their own homes before wandering on...Bajau Laut tribes of Semporna who built their homes on coral reefs in the ocean. And that settled ocean, as always in Vincenz, is near. It's the opposed cosmos, again not a social insect world, but buzzing with fish, not in shoals, not in pods, but singularly alone like us. However, complete solitude is not our lot, because the seashore is inhabited by a remarkable figure: beachcombing Ivan in his ragged rope belt. He recurs throughout Becoming the Sound of Bees, making sense, or nonsense, of everything: screaming blue at the sea, braving the heavy metals of that other social creature, the bedded oyster, his eyes watering as he surveys the city's polluted human hive. This new book by Marc Vincenz, through sheer dint of numberless invention, hums louder and more beautifully than any of our world's collapsing colonies. Tom Bradley

Becoming the Sound of Bees

Vincenz, Marc

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