Fiction. Marooned in a small Midwest town shortly after his divorce, Jim Fog succumbs to purposelessness and nostalgia while his ex, Sarah Car, has moved to New York City with the ambition of skipping over any mourning for their marriage. And old friend, ignorant himself of his action's consequences, enables the two protagonists to move through and haunt each other's lives. Eventually, the momentum of Fog and Car's alternating narratives push the two characters out of their static life-cages towards different unreal conclusions, and the narratives' shifting styles finally find a stunning equilibrium in a troubled and subversive escapism. Gary Lutz writes, "Eugene Lim renders the uncanny convergences of the lives of partners and strangers in a language entirely new. This is a deep, engulfing novel of breathtaking, even spooking precision--an altogether heady and heart-shaking debut."

Fog & Car

Literature & Fiction

Lim, Eugene

Contemporary

Ellipsis Press

Fiction. A spare and chilling account of the day-to-day experience of Sloper, a janitor in a big-city office building, WASTE explores the import of the discarded--for those who generate it, those who dispose of it, and those who are themselves discarded. From the humble prospect of his station, Sloper uncovers ominous possibility in lives he barely brushes. Brian Everson says, "Only Eugene Marten can keep a reader enthralled with the minutiae of a janitorial existence.... Precisely and exquisitely detailed, WASTE is a stark little masterpiece." And Dawn Raffel writes, "[P]itch-perfect. WASTE wastes nothing--not a syllable, a beat, a ragged breath." And Sam Lipsyte writes, "There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten's prose."

Waste

Marten, Eugene

Literary

Fiction. Mapping a utopia on the brink, THE MOTHERING COVEN's rare blend of charisma and pyrotechnic wordplay makes for an utterly original act of storytelling. Bertrand has disappeared from the house she shared with seven women--artists, scientists, and of course, witches. As the women plan a party for Mrs. Borage's hundredth birthday, Bertrand's absence threatens to dissolve the world they've created. "Deliriously imagined, THE MOTHERING COVEN is a work of wonder. Joanna Ruocco arrives: marvelous, and fully sprung!"--Carole Maso. "[A]n engagingly whimsical tale, graceful and inventive, with its own distinctive lexicon"--Robert Coover.

The Mothering Coven

Ruocco, Joanna

Fiction. In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess--by his art--a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his unnatural desire. SHADOWPLAY is a meditation on story-telling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations. "[A] journey as delicious as it is threatening"--R.M. Berry. "[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen"--Gary Lutz. "Wise up and get all you can of Lock"--Gordon Lish. "All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales..."--Kate Bernheimer. "Lock channels...our gorgeous desolation, our longing for connection, both earthly and divine"--Dawn Raffel.

Shadowplay

Lock, Norman

Poetry. Fiction. In its short tenure, the Brooklyn-based online literary magazine Harp &amp; Altar has defined itself by publishing innovative, risk-taking literature, establishing a home for serious readers attracted to its groundbreaking writing and original design. The energy and talent on display have been widely recognized--and now the best of this online magazine has been collected in THE HARP &amp; ALTAR ANTHOLOGY, which features a selection from the fantastic poetry and fiction published in the first three years.

The Harp & Altar Anthology

United States

Fiction. Stephen-Paul Martin has been called "one of our great deadpan humorists," by Eric Basso and "North America's foremost master of the short story" by Vernon Frazer. Marjorie Perloff has described his writing as "wildly comic," and Fanny Howe has called his stories "magnificent and entertaining." In CHANGING THE SUBJECT Martin once again deforms traditional notions of the story, giving us beautifully digressive revenge-fantasies, hysterical moral tales, and his singular, uncanny brand of the shaggy dog yarn. Kirpal Gordon writes, "What's so transformative in CHANGING THE SUBJECT is [the] range of knowledge--quantum mechanics, semiotics, literary theory, psychology &amp; meditation practice--delivered in a voice unpretentious yet outrageous, scary yet funny, reader-friendly yet beyond category."

Changing the Subject

Martin, Stephen-Paul

Poetry

Fiction. Introduction by Luisa Valenzuela. A young American traveler in Belize has a brief affair with a man known only as the German. In THE DREAMING GIRL, Roberta Allen's exquisite and incantatory language slyly manifests how reality may be bent and blurred by desires hidden even to ourselves. "[A] literary descendant of Duras, Allen places her unnamed narrator in an exotic Central American limbo that propels her mind into a mesmerizing state somewhere between memory and fantasy"—Ken Foster, The Village Voice. "A choral work where there are endless variations on the same theme, each beautifully developed... The girl's jungle is not some Henri Rousseau sketch conjured second-hand after an afternoon spent at the Jardin de Plants. Rather it has the precision of field notes written by a solipsistic ecologist"—Mary Mackey, The American Book Review. "Roberta Allen transmits the pain and compensating strangeness of living in vignettes as urgent and enigmatic as telegrams"—John Ashbery.

The Dreaming Girl

Allen, Roberta

Fiction. "THE PRESIDENT IN HER TOWERS is a deft, daft satire of bureaucracy, paranoia, professional envy, megalomania, the madness of specialization and the absence of transparency as they infect the university and, in general, our institutionalized existence. But Tom Whalen's exuberant, intelligent, and wryly allusive fiction is also an example—rare in our deadly serious literature—of the marvelous: a headlong adventure in storytelling, reminding us that writing needs no other justification than the esprit of a writer obedient to a high manic imagination. To read Whalen's book is a pleasure well beyond the ordinary; it is, in fact, to bear witness to a prodigious act of creation."—Norman Lock

The President in Her Towers

Whalen, Tom

Humor & Satire

Poetry. ODES & FRAGMENTS by Alan Davies presents a substantial collection of recent poetry, including odes and fragments as well as modes above and beyond. Ranging in length from a few words to twenty-plus pages, these poems vary widely, exploring love and fellowship, war and adversity, beginnings and endings (and the ongoing), instances of thought, feelings that flutter then fail, moments of apprehension (both senses), and our confrontation with the irretrievable.

ODES & fragments

Davies, Alan

Fiction. California Interest. Asian &amp; Asian American Studies. Who is Kafka-san? Is he a digitally remastered hologram of the famous writer? Or a golem engineered from a finger-bone excavated from a grave in Prague? Or just your garden-variety flesh-and-blood clone? No one is quite sure, least of all K, a Nisei woman hired to be Kafka-san's interpreter and chauffeur through millennial Los Angeles. In resplendent, incandescent prose, Karen An-hwei Lee fashions this short, strange trip out of a mind meld between the Czech fabulist of bureaucracies and a sun-hammered late-empire sprawl. Mary Caponegro says that the "verbal and the sensual are fused under [Lee's] supple pen, and you will marvel at her capacity to animate words, releasing them from habit and predictability into buoyancy." And Norman Lock states that "Lee has written a Waste Land for our time, whose symbolic epicenter is Los Angeles; her novella is, at once, a present dystopia and an uncanny invocation of Kafka, serving time in a penal colony where consumption and its proliferating glossaries have gone mad."

Sonata in K

Lee, Karen An-Hwei

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