WHEN HE SPRANG FROM HIS BED, STAGGERED BACKWARD, AND FELL DEAD, WE CLUNG TOGETHER WITH FAINT HEARTS, AND MUTELY QUESTIONED EACH OTHER by Christopher Kang
Fiction, 141 pages, $15, Paperback Original
ISBN 13: 978-0-9963342-3-5
Christopher Kang’s extraordinary collection, WHEN HE SPRANG FROM HIS BED, STAGGERED BACKWARD, AND FELL DEAD, WE CLUNG TOGETHER WITH FAINT HEARTS, AND MUTELY QUESTIONED EACH OTHER, resists easy classification. A daring, remarkable book that challenges on every read. These 880 stories taken together form a kind of sly, wondrous narrative whole, full in equal measure of humor, sadness, and brilliance. Kang is an ambitious writer, and this book is an achievement. Each of these stories contains a world, tilted on its own axis, strange, remarkable and bursting with heart.
Mega-City Redux by Alyse Knorr
Poetry, 62 pages, $15, Paperback Original
ISBN 13: 978-0-9963342-208
Alyse Knorr’s Mega-City Redux is a marvel. In 1405, Christine de Pizan, the world’s first female professional writer, published an allegorical work called The Book of the City of Ladies, in which she imagined constructing (with the help of her fairy godmothers Reason, Rectitude, and Justice) a walled city where women could live safe from sexism, misogyny, and gendered violence. Six hundred years later, women across the world still find themselves in need of such a city. Mega-City Redux, a novel in verse remix of Pizan’s allegory, charts a modern-day road-trip search for the mythical city, with the help of 21st-century feminist heroes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and Dana Scully from The X-Files.
Praise
“Christopher Kang’s work is mysterious, lovelorn, philosophical and often very amusing. Its lyricism is matched only by its daring. A remarkable book.” —Lorrie Moore, author of Bark: Stories
“These tiny novels or are they prose poems or pieces of a particle theory never let their genre indeterminacy cause blurring. Vivid as sword-thrusts, stroboscopic as a fall from a sudden precipice, marvelously stark as the outline of a pride of lions on the horizon, this book, sparkling like a bag of jewels, offers us the opportunity to live many lives without all those interstitial fascia. How about a shot of tequila? How about 880?” —Dean Young, author of Shock by Shock
“Christopher Kang’s brilliant first book, a steady accretion of Robert Walserian feuilletons, filled me with such quick strobes of delight and confusion and dismay and envy that, in the end, I mostly felt vertigo. This book is sly; it contains its own contradictions. It is a searing indictment of artistic ambition while being nakedly ambitious; it is self-reflective without a steady self to reflect; it is simultaneously starkly clear and confounding; and its intelligence is often punctured by humor and sentiment and near-aphorisms that ring so quietly and personally that I often wanted to write them in permanent marker on my skin.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
Praise
“‘You gals look like you know how to party.’ Pop open a PBR or order a Sex on the Beach and let Alyse Knorr guide you on a journey with Xena, Scully, and Buffy to a world ‘as safe as it ever will be’ from trauma and hopeless love in the age of screens. Mega-City Redux is essential architecture built from ‘sword, suit, stake, and pen’—feminine, marvelous, and mega-tough.” —Mel Nichols, author of Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon
“They say that when people talk about their favorite books they quickly shift from the books themselves to the circumstances in which they first read them, as if the experience inscribed the words upon the moment, so I want to tell you that I read Mega-City Redux in a bar in the summertime, listening to Desmond Dekker, drinking rosé from a can and eating cheese curds. It was a perfect afternoon. This book is such a treat, such a pleasure, so smart and funny and rueful and strong. It didn’t matter that I was all alone because in fact I was in the company of these bright and televised women: Xena, Buffy, Dana Scully, and a lovelorn speaker whose intelligence crackles like lightning through the page. What a splendid, moving, and—no kidding—LOL-inducing read.” —Heather Christle, author of Heliopause