Ants Dissolve in Moonlight

Literature & Fiction

W. B. Keckler

Poetry

Fugue State Press

This very funny, very bleak novella, "The Human War," is about the first hours of the 2003 war in Iraq, as experienced by a screwed-up kid in Ohio who feels the world is spinning out of his control. His reaction to the coming war? He drinks, has sex, goes to a strip club, he does anything that Youngstown, Ohio offers as human distraction--but this only makes his horror deepen. Noah Cicero's deadpan humor is reminiscent of Beckett, and "A Human War" is a blackly funny and deeply cruel look at the cold hearts of men. The novella is accompanied by two outstanding short stories, "The Doomed" and "Little Flowers," both dark, funny vignettes on the impossibility of human interaction: further examples of Noah Cicero's wicked talent. This is Noah Cicero's first book. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio.

The Human War

Cicero, Noah

Parenting & Relationships

Black Magic Woman # Zero Point Negro

Rivers, I

This novel tells the life story of Stet, a filmmaker from Soviet Leningrad, who (like the real-life Sergei Paradjanov) is sent to a prison camp in the 1960's, and who dies there without having produced much more than a single film. The novel is narrated in an extravagant third-person voice which emulates the sound and attitude of the classic "Russian Novel." Opinionated, discursive, soulful, the voice establishes the basis of the society in which Stet lives: a place where everybody judges, everybody feels he has the right to criticize, and the State even encourages "self-criticism." Failing that, the State may even criticize you to death. The novel imagines a world where we do not live by our judgments of others, nor by our fear of what other people think of us.Stet, a classic Russian "holy fool," does not criticize anybody, and does not defend himself, but simply works at his art without acknowledging any barriers. He does not compromise because it doesn't occur to him to compromise. The result is that he is treated brutally by friends and enemies, and is judged in every imaginable way. Yet he lives and dies as a happy man. The mystery of this is the mystery of the novel.James Chapman's Stet, the story of a Russian filmmaker who draws "pictures on the only storyboard in Russia that expresses and does not communicate," is a novel of relentless beauty and bleakness.... Written in a mesmerizing, meticulous prose, Chapman's novel is a bitter examination of the artist's place in society.... His narrator is a mind-blowing mishmash of third person, second person, first person plural; he revels in narrative intrusions and direct addresses to the reader. No object is safe from the examination of this narrator--not a teacup nor a hole in a shirt nor the sun. Inanimate or animate, tangible or abstract, even the most inconsequential object is shown to have some meaning overall, some contribution to the grand scheme, though this grand scheme is persistently met with pessimism and doubt. In a time of few truly important novels, when most so-called literary fiction is light or escapist, Stet is undoubtedly literature. For its breadth of ideas and emotional resonance, its uncompromised artistry and its great beauty, its inventiveness and experimental playfulness, Stet is a major accomplishment which deserves the gift that the work of its title character is denied: an audience.--Scott Bryan Wilson, Rain Taxi

Stet

Chapman, James

Contemporary

This brilliant first novel is a portrait of an artist at the end of an art form. The elderly Jewish-Hungarian composer Schneidermann, who survived a musical education, survived the war, survived Europe, survived the neglect of all his music, finally and suddenly vanishes during a movie matinee on the Upper West Side of New York.

Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press Classical)

Arts & Photography

Cohen, Joshua

Music

Deeply Russian in its sense of life, bitter, very funny, and shattered in its love of beauty, Fences by Ben Brooks shows what happens when the art of poetry and the art of the novel get in a head-on collision. Told in flashes and fragments of compressed emotion, this novel tells its story through glimmers of an intense personal narration: about a Russian girl, a librarian and an Italian man's mysterious wife, a hopeless car trip across Europe, judgement, inadequacy, God in his drunkenness, death at the end of time, and the fury of an apocalyptic search for meaning. 
 Ben Brooks has invented an involving new form for the novel - emotional montage like experimental film only wishes it could be - but more importantly has cut human desperation into pure form and made it go 180 miles an hour.

Fences

Ben Brooks

How does this writer, Vi Khi Nao, even exist?  She puts herself on a wood stove. Stretches her fingers. Stretches her back. Stretches her toes. She reaches out to the cutting board. She places herself on the cutting board. She slants herself on the cutting board. She lifts the hammer. She lifts it high. As high as her eyebrows. She lifts her skirt up. She lifts her skirt with the unused hand. She lifts it up for the view. She lifts the skirt. She lifts the hammer. The hammer falls... Wait: correction.  With a hatchet. She takes herself apart with a hatchet.  She puts herself on the wood stove....

The Vanishing Point of Desire

Vi Khi Nao

Story of a Story and Other Stories: A Novel

DIXON, STEPHEN

Genre Fiction

In America, history and myth are forced to populate the same terrain. America is not an answer to impossible questions, but a result of their friction. We live on territory permanently unresolved between historical malpractice and millennial ambition. We're a myth constantly collapsing into actual atrocities--a dream with the power to kill. As we export our dreams for the world to consume, the world finds American sleep a fissile hazmat, its half-life longer than any Geiger counter could reckon. "And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget / falls drop by drop upon the heart / until, in our own despair, against our will, / comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Thus Robert Kennedy, misquoting Aeschylus upon the death of Martin Luther King, 2 months before his own assassination. This astonishing and very different novel, vast, visionary, and grieving, is ambitious beyond any we have ever published. It aspires to tapestry the inner life of our American experiment in its three threads of despair, wisdom, and grace. Despair: each individual trauma as a local case of our national pathology. Wisdom: the ineradicable record of our wrongs. Grace, the awful grace of god: a mythic disclosure that cannot lie, though it can destroy. These three strands, and their mangled topology, are Michael S. Judge's "Lyrics of the Crossing."

Lyrics of the Crossing

Judge, Michael S.

Literary

The only readable and poetically-worthy translation of this great masterpiece of Hindu devotional literature. Four volumes.

Bhagavata Purana

Religion & Spirituality

Hinduism

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