"Michael Kimball is a hero of contemporary fiction." —Sam Lipsyte
A husband wakes up to find his wife has had a seizure during the night. His wife is rushed to a hospital where she lies in a coma. By day, the husband sits beside his wife and tries to think of ways to wake her up. The husband sleeps in the chair next to his wife's bedside dreaming that she will wake up. He wants to be able to take her back home.
Michael Kimball is author of The Way the Family Got Away, Dear Everybody, and the forthcoming Ray.

Literature & Fiction

Kimball, Michael

Contemporary

Tyrant Books

"If there's a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn't."—Dennis Cooper
"Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel."—Ben Marcus
I could go on at what these days were but the truth is I am tired. Would you even believe me if I did or didn't? Could this paper touch your face? I've spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I've read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues thin and white and speckled.
I don't want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.
Someday I plan to die.
Books that reappear when you destroy them, lampshades made of skin, people named with numbers and who can't recall each other, a Universal Ceiling constructed by an otherwise faceless authority, a stairwell stuffed with birds: the terrain and populace of Sky Saw is packed with stroboscopic memory mirage. In dynamic sentences and image, Blake Butler crafts a post-Lynchian nightmare where space and family have deformed, leaving the human persons left in the strange wake to struggle after the shapes of both what they loved and who they were.
Blake Butler is the author of Ever, Scorch Atlas, There Is No Year, and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. He is the editor of the literary blog HTMLGIANT.

Sky Saw

Butler, Blake

Literary

"Sam Michel is such a smart, manic, virtuosic stylist . . . the kind of deep insights that make you suddenly and newly appreciative of the world around you."—George Saunders
There was a hot, high sun, a hard ground and a long way off to any certain water, and my wife, a tenderfoot, I thought, not immodest, seemed bent on ruined feet and spectacle, on making of herself to passing innocents a living proof of what could happen to a man and woman ventured too far off alone together in the desert. Yet who passed? Who could be so innocent? Snakes and ravens, rabbits, buzzards, toads-- these passed, these witnessed, and what could they have made from us?...I saw myself preceded by my wife. I wanted to follow her, feel what she felt; I thought that I might find myself absolved… Maybe I would get some. Somewhere in me was a cheerful voice assuring me that what this needed was our getting laid.
Here is the head of his home—the one to speak, surely—on the occasion of his son Lincoln Dahl Jr.'s fifth birthday. Wife and mother order him to engage with his boy, but he remains in his chair dreaming up the speech he'll give to convey his life and glory to his boy, meanwhile avoiding his child and all others, until forced from his chair. Here's cowboy Beckett, a man of wonder and excess.
Sam Michel is the author of Under the Light and Big Dogs and Flyboys.

Strange Cowboy: Lincoln Dahl Turns Five

Michel, Sam

Life Is with People

Arts & Photography

Lish, Atticus

History & Criticism

But the lack of everything, is forming quite a blank. And the testament I give can't hold such a rupture: The unholy blank, a middle, around it another pillow blank. These things, in accordance, are not conducive to electrical strain (ME to YOU), So let's play:
Confession time: Ken Baumann's debut Solip isn't a novel. Think of how it feels to watch an engrossing film; now imagine becoming that film, your vision little more than a flickering image, your body just a burst of white vinyl. Baumann's non-novel, a vast detonation of language, not only captures that feeling, but also challenges you not to be held in its thrall. Indebted to Samuel Beckett and Gaspar Noé, Solip asks the reader to give up all human prejudice and surrender to life's new texture, the flesh become word: a code all Baumann's own, which bludgeons language as much as it opens prose fiction up to the highest horizon. Solip is a world for those who already dwell in the sentence, an anarchic hell that sounds something like heaven, by one of America's most promising young writers.
Ken Baumann lives in Los Angeles, California. He's worked as an actor for ten years in film, theater, and television. He currently stars in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, a series on ABC Family. His fiction, poetry, and essays have been published at VICE, Juked, HTML Giant, The New York Tyrant, Lamination Colony, and elsewhere. Baumann also runs Sator Press, a nonprofit that publishes innovative literature.

Solip

Baumann, Ken

"You can tell McClanahan feels something when he writes and when he lives. He wants you to feel something too."—The Huffington Post
I walked up to the side of the mountain like I used to do when I was a little boy. I looked out over Rainelle and watched it shine. The coal trucks and the logging trucks were still gunning it through town. They were still clear cutting the mountains and cutting the coal from the ground. Then I heard my mother calling and it was like I was a child again.
Beginning to read Hill William is like tuning into a blues station at 4:00 a.m. while driving down the highway. Scott McClanahan's work soars with a brisk and lively plainsong, offering a boisterous peek into a place often passed over in fiction: West Virginia, where coal and heartbreak reign supreme. Hill William testifies to the way place creates and sometimes stifles one's ability to hope. It reads like a Homeric hymn to adventure, to the human comedy's upsets and small downfalls, and revels in its whispers of victory. So grab coffee, beer—whatever gets you through the night—and join Scott around the hearth. Lend him your ear, but be warned: you might not want it back.
Scott McClanahan's work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Bomb, Vice, and Harper Perennial's Fifty-Two Stories. His books include Stories II and Stories V! In 2013 Two Dollar Radio will release his book Crapalachia.

Hill William

McClanahan, Scott

what purpose did i serve in your life is such a unique document that I have no idea if she could ever repeat its success. But she has gone all the way. She has not chickened out. She wrote the story she was given down to the bone. That's what real artists do. It's maybe the most surprising triumph to emerge from the literature of disaffection: What purpose did i serve in your life is the real thing." -Esquire Magazine The experience of reading what purpose did i serve in your life, which rides the line between performed and genuine vapidity and malign naiveté so closely that the distinction between them blurs, is by turns dull, titillating, appalling, riveting, and as head-spinning, in Hoberman’s phrase, as a hall of mirrors in which Girl Power and female powerlessness are endlessly reflected.” It is not, in other words, easy to turn away from. Easier, perhaps, to catch a shattered glance of oneself. -Slate Graphic, disturbing, enlightening and heart-warming (in its own weird way). —USA Today I have never read a book like this before. It’s painful, shocking, and compellingly written, composed with great sensitivity to which details should be revealed and which must stay concealed. Its genre-muddle and formal complexity make for a completely unforgettable, profoundly contemporary, and plainly great work of courage and art. Here’s a terrifying proposal: could this be The Great American Novel for the twilight of Great" America?" - Sheila Heti (author of "How Should a Person Be?") Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure. -Edmund White This society hates feelings,” Kathy Acker said about a million times. A chain of regulation controls us by making us fear that we will be expelled from the human club for being the wrong kind of person. Marie Calloway breaks that chain of regulation by displaying her body like a beggar displays her wounds, by asserting awkwardness and shame (for the body, for ambition). Her book should be called, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Who Can’t Be Controlled. Or is she the fiction, Holden Caulfield, Lolita, or Mme. Merteuil? How does a questing intelligence live inside the commodity?searching for identity or personal branding? And if she is an attention whore, am I the attention john? Yes--but Calloway wonders as strongly as I do about what she might be, and she invites misunderstanding into her work. One thing is certain, thoughShe can really write about sex! -Robert Gluck what purpose did i serve in your life is moving, unprecedented, threatening, and surrealthe exciting, rare work of someone with nothing to lose. It's intuitive and overpowering, concise and extreme. And, like a plant or a comet, it doesn't pause to explain what it's doing, defend or rationalize its existence, or attempt to obscure or distort its intentions. If you're attentive toward itand earnest and open-minded and non-malicious in your attentionyou will likely question and examine what you yourself are doing and why, and how to change." Tao Lin

what purpose did i serve in your life

Calloway, Marie

Preparation for the Next Life

Winner of the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction New York Times Best of 2014 Wall Street Journal's Best of 2014 Vanity Fair's Best of 2014 Publishers Weekly's Best of 2014 BuzzFeed's Best of 2014 
Zou Lei, orphan of the desert, migrates to work in America and finds herself slaving in New York's kitchens. She falls in love with a young man whose heart has been broken in another desert. A new life may be possible if together they can survive homelessness, lockup, and the young man's nightmares, which may be more prophecy than madness.
Praise for Preparation for the Next Life
 "Perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade." -The New York Times "As bold and urgent a love story as you’ll read this year." -Wall Street Journal "A sledgehammer to the American dream." -Kirkus Reviews "One of the most acclaimed debut novelists of the year." - New York Observer Lish (Life Is with People) turns to fiction with this stunning debut novel that plums the underbelly of New York City, tracing the relationship of Zou Lei, a Chinese immigrant working in a tiny noodle restaurant, and Skinner, an AWOL Iraqi war veteran and wanderer. Enduring stints in prison and homelessness, Zou Lei and Skinner experience life on society's fringes. Lish destroys the American dream with struggles his characters face and New York City is anything but idyllic. Zou Lei and Skinner have their budding relationship tested by insurmountable odds, and their own foibles and peculiarities are rendered with vivid detail. Lish's prose is at once raw and disciplined, and every word feels necessary. -Publishers Weekly "So much of American fiction has become playful, cynical and evasive. "Preparation for the Next Life" is the strong antidote to such inconsequentialities. Powerfully realistic, with a solemn, muscular lyricism, this is a very, very good book." –Joy Williams The “next life” of Atticus Lish’s novel is the one you have to die to know. It’s also the next civilian life of a soldier ravaged by three tours in Iraq, and the dodgy life of an immigrant in the city’s sleepless boroughs. The work is violent, swift, and gloriously descriptive. It is love story and lament, a haunting record of unraveling lives. Lish says starkly and with enormous power: the spirit prevails until it doesn’t. A stunning debut.
--Noy Holland, author of Swim for the Little One First 
An illegal Chinese immigrant meets a broken American warrior, and the great love story of the 21st century begins. The intersection of their paths seems inevitable, irrevocable. Their story: tender, violent, terrible, and beautiful. Atticus Lish's prose, lyrical and taut, sentences as exact and indisputable as chemical formulas, is trance-like, evangelical in its ability to convert and convince its reader. Preparation for the Next Life is that rare novel that grabs you by the shirt and slaps you hard in the face. Look, it says. It isn't pretty. Turn away at your own risk. In case you haven't noticed, the American Dream has become a nightmare. Atticus Lish has your wake up call. He has created a new prototype of the hero, and her journey provides us with a devastating perspective on the "promised land" of the post 9/11 U.S., where being detained is a rite of passage and the banality of violence is simply part of the pre-apocalyptic landscape. -Christopher Kennedy, Ennui Prophet

United States

"McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. [McClanahan] aims to lasso the moon. . . . He is not a writer of half-measures. The man has purpose. This is his symphony, every note designed to resonate, to linger."—New York Times Book Review
And so there was the falling and the falling and then the gasping for air--this love which is only a reminder of death--a spell cast to kill one another. Or perhaps it was from long ago in a play that wasn't a play anymore but an actual garden. And there was a man and there was a woman who were growing old together. And this was their only wish: Let us be young again. I thought about the play and the words of that world.These were not the last lines of a play but words from long ago that someone spoke to a someone--words that sounded like this. I was saying this now.For wherever she was—there was my Eden.
The Sarah Book is Scott McClanahan's continuation of the semi-autobiographical portrait he's been writing over the years about his life in West Virginia. This one is the portrait of his love there.
Scott McClanahan is the author of Hill William, Crapalachia, and many more. He lives in West Virginia.

The Sarah Book

"With her mixture of immediate honesty and everyman wit, Boyle has emerged as a cult voice of Millennials whom have come of age sharing confessional writing online."—Elle on selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee
On March 17, 2013, Megan Boyle undertook an exercise in self-edification by publicly documenting everything she did and everything she thought in real time. What began as a playful experiment resulted in a full-body immersion into the stream of consciousness with the air quickly rushing from the life jacket. LIVEBLOG is a journey into the supreme unknown: the individual. 
Megan Boyle lives in Baltimore, MD.

LIVEBLOG

Boyle, Megan

Women's Fiction

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