A send-off of the significant self. I will create no longer. "He" was killed and the blood splatter is captured here across the memoir's pages. What is paginated within were inceptive ideas I treated once as my own, as my conceptually-born children. Too young to die, I drowned them in the ink of the page followed by the severing of that person in me that gave reason to treat every opportunity with enthusiasm. So it turned out I have a taste for cyanide. I burned the documents with the body. I've escaped unfettered. Now, I have all the time in the world without a single thing to concern. Here I am, but then I am not. This is perhaps too personal for me to please anyone. It hits too close to where my heart once was held. But I'm left with this, documentation of the era of my life when my imagination still existed to fill the page. The final edit of the artist murdered. The inner thoughts, musings, and manifestations of the would-be artist, for whatever reasons discouraged and dispelled from the annals of creative expression. Here lies an exquisite corpse, the remains of, at one time, were an artists' exploratory map, and progress in-the-making - little more than a number of lines revealing a contradicting kind, those seeking desperately to grasp... for all those told to quit, there is to be at least one that should have kept with it. This is a memoir of personal failure and of what was sacrificed in order to re-emerge. I survived the misfortune only to live this sad, state of self-loathing. You'll come to hate this as much as I hate what I've become. Every day is a moment of silent withdrawal.

The Artist in Question

Michael J. Seidlinger

Civil Coping Mechanisms

Sunshine in the Valley is about the creation of life after the extinction of time. Taking place in a village surrounded by living walls, in which existence has become a frame of mind, a way of thinking, the narrative centers around a group of “childlike entities” whose age, like most everything in the world around them, eventually gets brought into question. Everything is alien, strange, and beautiful, as if written in hieroglyphics, illuminated by light, within a framework of existential clarity—or, perhaps, the shadow of that clarity, stipulated by its absence.

Sunshine in the Valley

Literature & Fiction

Muntz, Kyle

Literary

"Get it up!" demands the narrator of Frederick Mark Kramer's new novel, Ambiguity, of himself as he lies down to rest, as if his sexual energy could save him. However, for Kramer's narrator, Darko, sexual energy alone, although it abounds in Darko's memory, cannot save him. This is a novel about breath, or, as Darko calls it, "the pneuma." Darko says that "the pneuma can mean the breath of life or the destruction of life," and in between is where this novel takes place. Clearly Darko uses his entire life as his inspiration here, "inspiration" meaning "breathing in." Then Darko recounts this life in ten paragraphs that are gymnastic and acrobatic and celebrate corporeal existence. This is the "perspiration," or the "breathing through" life that Darko has exercised. His ten paragraphs, though, are ten breaths, ten exhalations, leading to a final "breathing out," or "expiration," as he takes to his bed, exhausted, demanding of himself a new beginning, not just the release of orgasm, but the orgasmic seeding of new life, a creative re-fertilization of the world and the rebirth of oneself. As always, Kramer is both resolutely readable and profoundly resonant in his work. Those familiar with his masterful novel Apostrophe/Parenthesis will find in Ambiguity that Kramer has produced another masterpiece that rivals the best works of anyone.---Eckhard Gerdes

Ambiguity: Journal of Experimental Fiction

Kramer, Frederick Mark

The 60 entries that constitute Paris 60 were recorded during Harold Jaffe's Spring 2008 Paris visit to greet the translation into French of one of his earlier volumes. Based loosely on Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, 1869, Paris 60 is both factual and fictionalized. Baudelaire was Parisian. Although a frequent visitor, usually for professional reasons, Jaffe is a self-acknowledged outsider, and his texts are written from that position.

Paris 60

Jaffe, Harold

The Narrator-the new novel by Michael Cisco, author of The Traitor and The Divinity Student-is also his most sophisticated. Cisco's prose, by turns phantasmagorical and exhilarating (reminiscent one moment of Robbe-Grillet, the next of Artaud, with a tinge of Thomas Ligotti, the imaginative virtuosity of Gene Wolfe or M. John Harrison), is like a stark sequence of strong iron bars, brimming with dark ambiance. Combining unmatched craft with masterful storytelling, this is literate fantasy unlike any other, intricate as the most elaborate dream, in which the narrator himself is the most ambiguous thing of all.

The Narrator

Michael Cisco

Fiction. "Michael J. Seidlinger writes, 'It begins with the debut—the courageous must tear down the preceding blockades with a crippling catastrophe.' To which I respond: It begins here, with this debut novel—the author courageously tearing down the preceding traditions with a formally crippling and linguistically catastrophical adventure"—Lily Hoang.

The Day We Delay

Seidlinger, Michael

Fiction. "Funny, mischievous, riotously re-Joycean, HUGH MOORE's protagonists are ultimately language and form themselves, its plot how they continuously surprise and delight while showing us how we're all filled with others trying to write our books, and how real love arrives, both inside and outside word worlds, not through work, but play"—Lance Olsen.

Hugh Moore

Gerdes, Eckhard

Best Behavior, the new novel by Noah Cicero, is his boldest work yet. As the subject matter becomes increasingly autobiographical, the landscape more bleak, its impact is blunt, brutal, but somehow still hilarious. This is the literature of pain: of living in a world where nothing is right–a temple to capitalism with no room for any kind of human spirit–and, despite everything, trying to find some way to deal with it; then eventually failing. Best Behavior might be the truest story ever told.
Best Behavior is slice-of-life, and that’s as it should be. Where the classics have beginnings, middles, and ends that are relevant to the mainstream consciousness of the times, Best Behavior is a couple of days in the life, making it a more honest and useful cultural artifact. — Rebecca Haze.
In ‘Best Behavior’ Noah Cicero tells a story that works on the precise level I can relate to. Every page speaks to me in his own words. He doesn’t bother making shit up. He says what he thinks needs to be said and then he moves forward from there. — Michael Davidson.
The story is told in sharp sentences that still manage to ramble, like Hemingway. It deals with a dream after the fact. It’s like waking up from a dream. The background is that the narrator thought he would/could possibly be a writer, as a “profession.” Five years after the publication of his first book, thats still not the case. This isn’t surreal though. This is real. He wanted to feel at home in NYC. But he can’t. He feels at home in Youngstown. But he doesn’t really feel at home there. He doesn’t feel at home anywhere really. And that is what makes this an American narrative. — Andrew Worthington.

Best Behavior

Cicero, Noah

Book 1: The Infinite Library Follow Alberto Gimaldi, code-cracker and bibliophile, as he unravels the mystery of an infinite library and discovers the treachery of the librarian Castellemare. What is the hidden plot of the library, and how will this impossible place set into motion a catastrophic narrative by the artful textual manipulation of unwitting agents in the real world? What is the buried and secret connection between all text and all life? A novel of dark mystery, infinity, and a compelling story for all those who love books and book-related enigmas. Codes, ciphers, and the sinister await those who would set foot inside the Infinite Library. This is the first book of the trilogy.Also available:Book 2: The Infinite AtrocityBook 3: The Infinite Grey

The Infinite Library

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Faucher, Kane X

Mystery

Deer running through a ghost neighborhood. A boy trapped in a basement for eight years. Three young people locked in a violent sex triangle. Come inside. Already caught between the ambition and alienation of life at an Ivy League school, Jon Danfield must come face to face with a revelation about his small-town past. His journey will take him away from the halls of privilege and into the heart of the monstrous forest fire threatening his childhood home. On deserted suburban streets lined with perfect houses, Danfield must confront an American dream corroded by unspeakable acts of cruelty. 
 Also includes “Rat Beast“, "The Girlfriend Game," and “Winter was Hard.”

Fires

Antosca, Nick

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