Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

Robert, Coover

Dzanc Books

Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Robert Lopez’s hypnotic second novel, is the story of a young man whofinds himself confined and under observation, the subject of seemingly pointless tests. His only link to the outside world is a telephone that will not dial out. During the occasional calls he receives, usually wrong numbers, the narrator remembers his former life growing up in Injury, Alaska with his Mother, an often unemployed single parent, and his older brother, Charlie, a sometime boxer, sometime actor. Throughout the course of this extraordinary novel, the unwilling captive draws his life-story in stickfigures on the walls. From the difficulty of his birth, to his sickly childhood, to adventures with his brother, the narrator depicts his crazy life, which is at once fascinating and heartbreaking. The one memory that haunts him is that of watching a movie about slaves on television and how that one slave, the one for whom Kamby Bolongo Mean River meant freedom, would never relinquish the idea of returning home. Darkly hilarious with a crushing emotional impact, Kamby Bolongo Mean River is a brilliant study of familial bonds and trauma, isolation and captivity, hope and hopelessness. “Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.”—Sam Lipsyte,author of Home Land “In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Calmative’ and Gordon Lish’s Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez’s new novel gets under your skin and latches on.”—Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain

Kamby Bolongo Mean River

Literature & Fiction

Lopez, Robert

United States

"What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is a lovely, remarkable book, full of people who strive mightily to believe in thingsBigfoot, the Lochness and Lake Michigan monsters, a tunnel leading to the other side of the world, husbands, wives, lovers, parentsthey shouldn't. But Laura van den Berg lets her characters believe, and believes in them, and makes us believe, and care, too. Calm, wry, and compassionate, somehow all at once, this book is impossible to resist, and I'd bet big money that we'll be talking about Laura van den Berg and her fiction for years to come." - Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England "In her first collection Laura van den Berg creates a series of remarkable characters each of whom is striking out for territory unknown, plunging into an uncharted sea. I love the exhilarating sense of adventure in these stories, how they make the world seem larger, and how van den Berg maps our familiar pains in strikingly new ways. What The World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us is a dazzling and original debut." - Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street and Eva Moves the Furniture "There is a special kind of magic in the writing of Laura van den Berg, a damp-eyed sorceress who blends the mythological with the everyday, buoyant playfulness with lacerating sadness. Each sentence reads like a beautiful bruise smeared across pages as pale as the bodies that so often strip off their clothes and tangle together in these tender, elegant stories." - Benjamin Percy, author of Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk "Discussions about debuts often allude to promise, as if to imply that better things will come, but in this particular case, there’s no need to wait. Laura van den Berg’s talents are already fully formed, and spectacular. This collection has searing emotions, a technical virtuosity, and a lyrical ferocity that dazzle us with undeniable force. Breathtakingly, we follow her characters as they seek escape in far-flung locales, both real and imagined, searching for that rarest of speciesthe feeling that they belong." - Don Lee, author of Wrack and Ruin and Yellow Laura van den Berg finds the tension between science and magic and walks it like a tightrope. . . . It is a fantastic and fascinating world, full of discoveries and moments of wonder, a book meant for the explorer in all of us.”Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief Containing work reprinted in Best Non-Required Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prizes 2010, the stories in Laura van den Berg's rich and inventive debut illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane. A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot inpersonator. A bontanist seeking a rare flower crosses path with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forest of the Congo. And in the title story, a young woman traveling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer. Rendered with precision and longing, the women who narrate these starkly beautiful stories are consumed with searching -- for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives.

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us: Stories

Van Den Berg, Laura

 The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (Publishers Weekly 10/26/09)Hesh Kestin. Dzanc (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 paper (334p) ISBN 9780976717782"From the author of the short fiction collection Based on a True Story comes a vibrant, hilarious addition to the genre of mob tragicomedy. Twenty-year-old Russell Newhouse, a quick-witted scholar and skirt-chaser, has New York’s organized crime scene thrust upon him by a man called Shushan “Shoeshine” Cats, who interrupts a meeting of a Brooklyn Jewish men’s society where Russell is serving as secretary. Shushan is in need of a favor and promptly takes Russell under his wing. What ensues is a classic boy-meets-mob story: part noir, part comedy, part epic. Kestin’s richly layered characters—a monstrously obese German organized crime attorney named Frit von Zeppelin, a Jewish Texan who speaks in malapropisms, a dentist who anglicizes or Yiddishizes his name depending on his mood—are straight out of Dickens; his vivid attention to the details of place, New York, and time, 1963, is like poetic journalism; and his snappy, concise prose and dialogue is on par with Raymond Chandler. Kestin zips through Russell’s sexual trysts, dealings in back rooms of Little Italy restaurants, and encounters with historical events like the JFK assassination with unflagging humor and insight." (Nov.) Hesh Kestin’s Based on a True Story was a Kansas City Star Top Ten Book of 2008.Jewish gangsters in 1960s New York City. A fast-paced, funny look at a time when America still seemed young and moving forward. A smart young man is mentored by the gangster of his time.

The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

Kestin, Hesh

Dawn Raffel's stories are like prismatic drops of rain, hanging from the edge of a roof or sliding down a windshield, reflecting an entire world within. The language of motherhood, of adulthood, of childhood the language of family and individual has never been like this. Sly and probing, with the sting of precision and pain.” Susan Straight In Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe the oppressive truth of our mortality unsettles but does not vanquish the spirit. The woman as drudge may be "a failure at folding," but she is a rare songmaker whose dialogues with a son, a sister the usual figures from the family romance make for a musical and philosophical call and response. The son proposes one way to keep birds from crashing into fatally clear windows is to open the windows all over the world.’ These stories promise more life. Take them to heart!” Christine Schutt When Dawn Raffel was a very small child, her father used to read to her nightly from The Restless Universea layman’s guide to physics by the Nobel Laureate Max Born. Although she loved the time spent with her father, she didn’tdespite his statements to the contrarycomprehend a word of the physics. It was her first recognition that love so often comes with imperfect understanding. The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time. Of her previous work, one reviewer stated, Raffel takes conventions and smashes them to bits” and another called it extreme literature.” Of Further Adventures, Publisher’s Weekly says, Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace.” Dawn Raffel is the author of a previous collection of short stories, In the Year of Long Division, and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, NOON, Open City, The Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, Unsaid, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She has taught creative writing in the MFA program at Columbia University and is a magazine editor in New York City. Readers have come to expect from Dawn Raffel’s prose nothing less than the syllable-by-syllable perfections of purest poetry and the boldest wisdom a human heart can hold. Her new collection of pithy, exquisite fictions about the timeless crises of mothers, daughters, and wives is breathtaking and haunting in its majestic exactitudes.” Gary Lutz Less has never been more than in Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. These spare, high-intensity stories of brave people at the end of their ropes are not only models of writerly integrity, but monuments of the spirit asserting itself out of the depths of silence.” David Gates

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe: Stories

Raffel, Dawn

Roy Kesey has been hailed as one of our best young writers. All Over, his debut collection,presents nineteen of his most original stories. They first appeared in magazines such as McSweeney's, Ninth Letter and The Kenyon Review, and have been chosen for anthologies including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction.

All Over

Kesey, Roy

Contemporary

“Stories like beautiful black diamonds. Someone has cut you while you were dreaming, slipped them into your muscles, your mind. You may never know just how you’ve been changed.”—Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury
The title story was included in The O.Henry Prize Stories 2007.

In a Bear's Eye: Stories

Murphy, Yannick

Winner of the Bullfight Little Book Prize, Nothing in the World received unanimously great reviews, and sold out its original 2006 printing in just a few months. Dzanc Books is excited to bring this remarkable work back into print.

Nothing in the World

“Markus has a remarkable ability to strip life down to its basics, to the point where the metaphors we manufacture as the looking-glass for our existence end up standing in for existence itself. Fish, mud, night and river come to stand in place of family connections as fathers and sons, by giving themselves to fishing give themselves over to a lone search and to loss.”—Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain
Peter Markus has published three story collections and lives in Michigan.

Bob, or Man on Boat

Markus, Peter

This print anthology compiles the best fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that online literary journals have to offer in an eclectic collection in the manner of other broad-ranging anthologies such as the Pushcart Prize and The Best American Non-Required Reading. This is the first substantial attempt at creating an annual print compilation of the best of material published online.“[The] mingling and occasional blurring of genres distinguishes Best of the Web from any other print collections showcasing online literature...the book is heartily significant , featuring work that is sometimes surprising...and sometimes exhilarating—not unlike the Web itself.”—Los Angeles Times“The Internet is built for this work: short and weird, just what one’s attention span wants when clicking through. And Almond and Leslie wisely pick up on that, making the book worth paging through, as well.”—Time Out Chicago“Such a development could not have come at a better time for onlineliterary publishing.”—NewPages.com“Though publishing online provides us the opportunity to present fiction freefrom economic imperative, permitting us, our authors, and our readers to relishin the experiment of expression, one of our great regrets is forgoing the sensation of binding it, printing it, holding the work we proudly select in our hands. Then along comes Dzanc Books, and this gift of a book, Best of the Web , that feels, to us, like the presentation of an award.”—Aaron Petrovich and Alex Rose, editors, Hotel St. George“While reading this anthology, you may find yourself muttering , ‘Wheredid Dzanc find such brilliant fiction and non-fiction-y writing? Are theywitches? ’ I don’t want to give away too much of the magic, but I will saythis...yes, they are witches.”—Eric Spitznagel, web editor, Monkeybicycle.netIn Best of the Web 2008:Zachary Amendt, Jonathan Ames, Arlene Ang, Michael Bahler, Robin Behn, David Bottoms, Kris Broughton, Benjamin Buchholz, Edward Byrne, Melanie Carter, Jared Carter, Nancy Cherry, Elaine Chiew, Andrea Cohen, Myfanwy Collins, Leigh Anne Couch, Elizabeth Crane, Stevie Davis, Bruce Fischer, Abby Frucht, Charlie Geoghegean-Clements, Garth Risk Hallberg, Seth Harwood, Edward Hirsch, Cara Hoffman, Sandra Huber, Richard Jespers, Christina Kallery, Thomas King, Anna Kushner, Frannie Lindsay, Valerie Loveland, Maurice Manning, LaTonya McQueen, Juan José Millás - translated by Peter Robinson, Amy Minton, Bill Mohr, Okey Ndibe, Stefani Nellen, Jenny Pritchett, Jacques Rancourt, Christopher Rizzo, Amy L. Sargent, George Saunders, R. T. Smith, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Andrew Sorge, Anne Dyer Stuart, Sarah Sweeney, Ron Tanner, Justin Taylor, Tess Taylor, Kim Whitehead, David Willems, Paul Yoon, J. W. Young, Claudia Zuluaga, introductions from series editor Nathan Leslie and edition editor Steve Almond, and interviews with select authors.

Best of the Web 2008

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