Tattoo

Malakowsky, Steve

Outcast Press

The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life is a story of searching – for friends, for forgiveness, for truth. A detailing of friendship dragged through the Amazon jungle and spit out through the stars with the aid of decades, DMT, and well-meaning debauchery.\nRoosevelt “Rosy” Robinson is a broken man living a purgatory existence in Peru. Two of his oldest friends from Canada—Stanley “The Deuce” Doucette and Ishmael “Ishy” Lords—have pressing news to deliver. Never have two individuals been so ill-equipped to navigate the “Gringo Trail,” but this is precisely what they must do to track down Rosy in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet.\nAmbitious, gritty, and raucously entertaining, Sean McCallum’s debut novel takes readers from Toronto and New York to Lima, then across the Andes, down the Amazon River, and into darkness. Bristling with tragedy, regret, and a little ayahuasca, The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life screams into the void with electric urgency, reveling in what it means to be alive.\nThis book grabs readers by the wrist and leads them headlong into an authentically raw examination of love and friendship. It's a moving tale of the places we go to seek forgiveness.\nEditorial Reviews\nLauren Sapala, transgressive author of The INFJ Revolution, Between the Shadow and Lo, and West is San Francisco:\n"Extraordinary, profound, and intensely alive, this book stays with you. It’s a heady mix of the suffocating jungle bleakness of Hunter S. Thompson’s Rum Diary brewed together with the magical boyhood winters of Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy.\nOpening with a quote (or rather, a mathematical equation) from the iconic polymath Benoit Mandelbrot, The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life gives an enigmatic precursor to the intricately layered narrative within. From the first chapter, we’re immersed in the squalid, heartbreaking intensity of Iquitos: a sprawling Peruvian metropolis where it’s easy to get lost, and even easier to lose yourself.\nRosy—consistently drunk and emotionally damaged—is one of the lost ones, and, as we follow the path of his past memories and the curve of his current anguish, we begin to understand with chilling clarity why he's chosen this particular place to enact his downward spiral.\nSkipping forward and backward in time, we live through every important memory. We’re introduced to his tight inner circle and how they grew up together. We watch him on the night he falls in love at first sight, then the torturous aftermath. When we come back to present-day Iquitos, he meets the girl who will change everything for him, and--because we’ve seen every essential thread of meaning woven through the tapestry of Rosy’s life--we know this was always meant to be.\nMeanwhile, Ishy and The Deuce, his two best friends, have undertaken their own quest down to Iquitos to find Rosy and bring him back before it’s too late. We follow each storyline until they merge into an electrifying conclusion. There, we finally learn about the horrifying event that drove Rosy to run away from his life and bury his soul deep underground.\nThe Recalcitrant Stuff of Life challenges the reader on so many different levels: Narcissistic characters undermine our assumptions with acts of great kindness, then shatter that illusion the very next page by doing something despicable. Vindictive femme fatales reveal a history of exploitation and abuse, dissolving the mask of rage by showing the wounded little girl beneath. Every character, every turn in the narrative is like that. You think you know where you are, what your opinion is, what’s wrong with everybody, and then McCallum twists the knife until you realize you know nothing—and you never did.\nAny reader looking for an antidote to the commercial literary pap churned out by mainstream publishers will instantly fall in love."

The Recalcitrant Stuff Of Life

Literature & Fiction

McCallum, Sean

Literary

Ambrose, a failed Bay Area drug dealer, is at the end of his rope after running afoul of his wicked connection one too many times. A friend suggests he hide out at her sister's guest house in Palo Alto by posing as a Stanford grad student. There, Ambrose settles into upscale suburban life and finds himself falling for Jessica, a lonely housewife with the soul of an artist. Disruptor to this new existence is Jessica's husband, Mike, a tech tycoon whose path crossed with Ambrose on a drug-fueled night at a club. When Ambrose's cover is blown, all hell breaks loose as secrets are spilled and lies shatter on a posh, limestone patio deep in the heart of this California dreamscape.\nPoser, the first novel in the Eucalyptus Lane series, offers a class-conscious, peeping tom gaze into Silicon Valley's bedrooms and back-alleys, where dreams really do come true and unlikely, life-altering connections are made, for better-or worse.

Poser: A Eucalyptus Lane Novel, Book 1

McPherson, Nevada

Henry Gallagher is going to die. His liver is failing and, with each drink, his chances of living past age thirty crumble around him. Over a chaotic two-year blur, he stumbles through inebriated nihilism, reveling in an unending parade of violence, blackouts, half-hearted AA meetings, psych ward stints, dangerous sexual encounters, suicidal behavior, and shattered relationships. Two events force Henry to look inward and face the disturbing truths left to fester for so many years, drenched in booze, but always staring up at him from the bottom of a whiskey bottle: During his darkest hour, he receives an offer that threatens to change his life forever and a mental diagnosis that, in Henry's mind, makes him more monster than man.\nIn his highly confessional style, Jack Moody's scathingly witty novel follows the hero's journey of a man hurtling into the depths of addiction, mental illness, and self-destruction. Wrestling with his survival instinct and self-awareness, his journey will inevitably-with his shield or on it-come to an end.

Crooked Smile

Moody, Jack

Humor & Satire

How would you feel if today was your last day on Earth? Lotus is the part of yourself you're afraid and ashamed by, all the bad thoughts you shove inside the back closet in an empty room in the darkest corner of your brain. This 18-poem literary/visual arts collection explores themes such as death, sex, drugs, drinking, honesty, and the after-life. With rock 'n' roll flare and an appreciation for nature, Austin Davis unravels everything from teenage degeneracy to the cosmos in under 50 pages.\nGrateful acknowledgement is made to Myla K. Smart from the Etsy shop @ArtnNeedles for providing phenomenal artwork, as well the editors of the following publications where some of these poems first appeared: *** 
Button Poetry, Emerge Literary Journal, Ghost City Press, Maudlin House, Okay Donkey Magazine, andThe Tempe Writers Forum

Lotus & The Apocalypse

Arts & Photography

Davis, Austin

History & Criticism

Loaded guns, lesbian love, inverted expectations, and lecherous mafia-types make this a novella not to forget.\nKika was a map of bruises. She was a cicatrix of vengeance, the scar of a wounded mind, the fetid and gangrenous lesion of a town's malevolent psyche. And she's come back to Carbon, Georgia, to find her missing sister.\nFighting tooth and nail, wielding her trusty crowbar, Hell hath no fury like the violent storm Kika brings to Carbon. She'll tear through the town and its criminal underworld until she finds her sister.\nInspired by Virginie Despentes' Baise Moi, The Shit of God by Diamanda Galas, and Cynthia Pelayo's Into the Fire and All the Way Through, this is the story of violence inflicted on women, and the cold vengeance served to those responsible. Informed also by female revenge films such as Coffy, Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion, I Spit on Your Grave, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Perras Malas delivers several acts of vengeance to the evil men of Carbon.

Perras Malas

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Torres, Manny

Thrillers & Suspense

Girl Of The Oil Sands

Green, I L

Dramas & Plays

Half-Empty Doorways and Other Injuries

Self-Help

Golds, Stephen J.

Relationships

Teenage dreams, ambitions and rebellion. Coming-of-age irony at its finest. Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares is a searingly honest and brutally funny account of LG Thomson's experience of being part of the first generation to grow up in Scotland's most ambitious New Town. She was four when her family moved from their single-room tenement flat in Glasgow to a council house in Cumbernauld, a social experiment billed as The Town for Tomorrow. Told mainly in the 1970s, the book reflects upon a time when trousers were flared, sexism was the norm, and the beating of school children wasn't only condoned, it was industrialised. But with mass strike action, the three-day week, and the shift from the old imperial monetary system to decimalisation, it was also a time of great unrest and change. Set against the social landscape of the time is Thomson's personal story - the trauma of sexual abuse and coming to terms with being an outsider. Though the time and place are specific, the themes of Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares are universal.

Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares

Biographies & Memoirs

Thomson, LG

Arts & Literature

Cracker: A Eucalyptus Lane Novel, Book 2

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