O Fallen Angel is a triptych of modern-day America set in a banal Midwestern landscape, inspired by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. There is “Mommy,” a portrait of housewife psychosis, cruelly and crudely drawn, fenced in by her own small mind. There is “Maggie,” Mommy’s unfortunate daughter whom she infects with fairytales, a Dora stuffed numb with pills, a casualty of gender roles and the DSM-IV. Then there is the mysterious martyr-figure Malachi, a Cassandra in army fatigues, the Septimus Smith to Mommy’s Mrs. Dalloway, who stands at the foot of the highway holding signs of fervent prophecy, gaping at the bottomless abyss of the human condition, while SUVs scream past. Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel commits an act of anarchic literary sacrilege that calls to mind the rant and rage of an American Elfriede Jelinek, an exorcism of the culture wars and pop-cultural debris, a sneering indictment of deaf ears, blind eyes, and mute mouths.

O Fallen Angel

Literature & Fiction

Zambreno, Kate

Literary

Chiasmus Press

Poetry. Jeanne Heuving is a writer and critic whose cross genre work seeks to engage oblique aspects of existence and to alter conventional understanding. An exploration of being and sex, excitement and inscription, INCAPACITY engages a terrain where lush and exacting scenes fall into dereliction and disrepair. "Engaging the potential of post-patriarchal narrative and subjectivity, yet inside women's dilemmas in our time, Jeanne Heuving writes a saturated, paradoxical, pensive, and intense book on transformative seismic events and on misty envelopments that link inside and out like moebius loop"--Rachel Blau Duplessis.

Incapacity

Heuving, Jeanne

Poetry

Fiction. Possibly the Northwest's first, full-fledged mock biography of a fictional CEO who created a coffee empire and sipped the soul out of a city. Authored by a twice removed hand, or, the truth laid bare through a series of fictions.

On the Roast: The Best Grinds of My Corporation

Nufer, Doug

Fiction. EAST OF ELKO...a future where a morphed and sprawling Basque resistance to the new economy and the logical extension of Orwellian thought control play out across the desert of the real. "Unnervingly timely and a pure plain neuro-pleasure to read, EAST OF ELKO is a powerful science fiction metaphorization of our present that explores if resistance to the mediaization and commodification of consciousness and selfhood is still possible"-Lance Olsen.

East of Elko

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Mingo, Andy

Science Fiction

Fiction. In the 80's a young woman advertises her services as a model to photographers; she discovers their weaknesses, seduces them, then extorts them by claiming to be under-age. In the 90's a 40-something man is married to a doctor who only views him as a sex object. In these two reversals of sexual harassment and gender-inferiority, Mazza explores such issues asthe lnaguage of bodies, sexual desirability, latent adolescence, plus whatever the genders share...and what they can never share.

Many Ways To Get It, Many Ways To Say It

MAZZA, CRIS

Fiction. You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor—this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam. Be sure to check out Lance Olsen's other titles at SPD, including Sewing Shut My Eyes.

10: 01

Olsen, Lance

Fiction. FRANK is an "unwriting" of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, the story of Frank Stein, distant cousin of Gertrude, who, in revolt against southern racism, succumbs to the siren song of linguistics, inventing from language a life of his own. But in creating a new life, Frank revives an old plot, giving birth to monstrography. Frank's undoing is narrated by New Yorker Rob Lawton whose literary aspirations have gone south, all the way to the Everglades, where he has encountered Frank lying senseless in a johnboat. Their story within a story uncovers a more literally untamed America than either could have foretold, a horroglyphic creation of mad weirdploy and hybrid TV-speak which exacts a violent revenge. Only by making an end of Frank's creation can Rob hope to escape the conclusion plotted against him one hundred eighty years earlier by an eighteen-year-old girl. "A genuinely aesthetic blockbuster"-American Book Review.

Frank

Berry, R.M.

In some unnamed alter-America, things are getting weird: it's starting to look as though the president may be manufactured, a fat, bald old man in superhero tights rapes young girls in the ghetto, a celebrity porn star loses her mind and disappears, a serial-killing "werewolf" slaughters scores of prostitutes while the police remain baffled, mysterious mega-corporations disintegrate and vanish without a trace and gangs of street urchins announce the coming of their messiah, who will arrive in the form of a shirtless, knife-wielding, blond boy . . . meanwhile, some spectral, enigmatic force seems to pull all the strings as everyone marches blindly into an almost incomprehensible civil war. 
By turns punishingly stark and wildly lyrical, grimly humorous and deadly serious, The Garbageman and the Prostitute is an eerie, genre-bending tour de force, a Menippean satire echoing the envelope-pushing pulp fiction of Philip K. Dick, Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson, as well as the seminal literary innovations of Franz Kafka, William Faulkner and Alain Robbe-Grillet. It is a dark, disjointed journey into the meanings of memory, madness and murder . . .

The Garbageman and the Prostitute

Zack Wentz

Fiction. MY SISTER'S CONTINENT is a contemporary retelling of Freud's infamous "Dora" case study, following a loosely parallel plot and containing similarly controversial sexual themes and layers of possibilities. Kirby is a young woman attempting to come to terms with a "failed" bout of therapy while concurrently trying to decipher the truth about her identical twin, Kendra's, life. When she is sent a skewed case study of herself by her former psychiatrist, she decides torespond by using Kendra's journals to reconstruct her final months with her sister and her brief time in therapy, finally creating her own version of the truth.

My Sister's Continent

Frangello, Gina

Fiction. "Hang onto your hats, ladies and gents, you're about to meet some folks you won't soon forget, even if you want to. Kat Meads's hilarious and hair-raising tale of Kitty Duncan's reckless and willful descent into perdition is an irresistible one. She's like some exhilarated musician who has found a mighty new instrument, and blasts one amazing and unexpected chord after another, alarming us with her narrative bravado and enchanting us with her strange and haunting melody"-John Dufresne. "Taut, incisive, and sardonic, crisp yet droll, Kat Meads's quirky fiction has an open-door policy allowing emotion, pathos and drama to come inside, to visit for a while, to watch from the sidelines, or put their hands around your throat"-Cris Mazza.

The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan

Meads, Kat

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