“Marcy Beller Paul’s Underneath Everything is a lyrical and haunting debut novel. The story of Mattie and Jolene digs right into the heart of a poisonous friendship between two teenage girls, and I found myself holding my breath during the book’s final pages.” — Jennifer Mathieu, author of The Truth About Alice
Read More“Gina Valenzuela has never known what it’s like to go without. Her father, Baron Sr., is the richest man in Los Angeles. The life of private jets, haute couture and a monolithic house in Brentwood filled with priceless art has insulated her from the severe draught that has befallen the city. While people in LA wait anxiously every day for their two hours of water service, the Valenzuelas drink and bathe in Perrier that comes from a gigantic cistern in the kitchen. Baron Sr. collects children like some women collect Birkin bags. The children are adopted from all over the world, deliberately chosen for their diversity in that clichéd way that can only be found in LA. Gina was plucked from Guatemala, but her mother and now Baron’s third ex wife, (now referred to by family members as “X3”,) always laments she wanted another boy who had the most beautiful eyes. Too bad he had a heart condition. Even the family portraits taken by Annie Liebowitz can’t hide the Valenzuela dysfunction. Gina knows she has to get out.”
Read More“Martin has an easy life in the utopia that is post-apocalyptic Paris. The hedonistic society, devoted to leisure and sex, leaves little room to complain. The Server, an artificial intelligence that governs the city, has walled off Paris from the barbaric outside world that reverted to the Bronze Age after a series of calamities. At the Apple Store, Martin is introduced to the hottest new release, Best Friend. The device, a translucent laurel wreath, is worn like a crown and can create a vivid three dimensional experience with any person, in any place, living or dead. With Best Friend engaged, Martin spots a beautiful young woman on the other side of the tracks in the Metro. He doesn’t have to imagine her touch, her lips, her smell. Best Friend has taken care of that, and the woman doesn’t even know it. Across the tracks, Martine is having her own fun. Through a glitch, Martin and Martine are united in their experience.”
Read More“Plague City shows you how literature might (must!) move forward in a chaotic world." - Jane L. Carman, author of Tangled In Motion
Read More"The effect of Yu-Han Chao’s prose is like that of a razor cut: straightforward, barely noticeable at first. Then the air hits, the sting begins, and then—oh, then!—comes the blood. She knows exactly when to begin and end a story, leaving the reader to absorb the impact of what has happened long after the final sentence. Her characters often leave others scarred by their actions, sometimes out of cruelty, but more often out of the casual egotism that comes with the city’s territory. These are stories that will stay with you for a long, long time." —Charlotte Holmes, author of The Grass Labyrinth
Read More"Brick by brick. Detail by detail. Word by word, Difalco uncovers worlds closed for the moment to most prize-list readers. Their loss. For, with such a skilled and sure literary hand as Difalco to guide, many of these lost souls would find their way into most readers' hearts." - Front & Centre
Read More“It is 1980. The buildings and storefronts at Barton Street and Sherman Avenue are dilapidated remnants of Hamilton's once-thriving steel industry. The corner is also the nexus of a violent street gang that has left citizens terrorized and police impotent. Mean Season chronicles the random beatings, arson, sexual assaults, and other unfathomable violence of that time in the city's history, as Bobby Sferazza, a smart, tough, football-playing University of Toronto student, returns home to take a summer job as a night-club bouncer. As he attempts to help his widowed mother with his wayward kid brother, his take-no-prisoners mind-set leaves him entangled in drugs and gangs, with his bright future caught in the crossfire.”
Read More“Salvatore Difalco’s fiction is a finely blended mix of toughness, street-smart insights and violence, along with flashes of tenderness and compassion. (His stories) are thoughtful, enigmatic ... drawing the reader in with sharp detail, poetic phrasing and recognizable characters. Though we’re dealing with thugs, prostitutes and crackheads, they are all folks you’ll feel uncomfortably at home with. That’s Difalco’s magic: scrape characters from the bottom of society’s bowl and reveal them in literary daylight as powerless dreamers, failed mothers, caged creatures.” - Matthew Firth, Front & Centre
Read More"Salvatore Difalco's stories are small miracles: fresh, literate, startling, and a bit off-kilter, like something seen in a dream or out of the corner of your eye." —Stephen Osborne, Geist
Read More"Assembled from soundbites, lists, landscapes, and found objects, Craig Foltz’s writing chases the day to day lives of our contemporaries down absurdist avenues..."
Read MoreThe year is 1971, the place is California, and what never seemed possible suddenly becomes irresistible. Camping on the shores of Fallen Lake in the high Sierra, two couples swap partners and glimpse paradise. That night changes the course of their lives and their children's as the two marriages become one. The families move in together in suburban Pleasant Valley, the exhilarated adults pursuing their four-sided relationship and their dream careers. At first resentful of this upheaval, the children find unexpected advantages. But the door flung open by the sexual revolution is starting to close. Too late the lovers realize what they will have to pay for living out their fantasies.
Read More“...a strong offbeat literary voice...with a fabulist element to it...almost, but not quite, fairy tale like but for adults. I was reminded of Donald Barthelme when he was doing stuff like Dead Father and Robert Coover when he was doing stuff like Pricksongs and Descants.” –Alan Catlin, editor of Misfit Magazine
Read More“The main point about these stories is deep emotion and concrete theme. We notice very impressive ardour of imagination in these stories.”
Read More“It’s a catalog that you can’t order anything from. A manual with no instructions. In Sharpen, Rich Ives takes the reader through a series of meditations inspired by tools, bodies, and stranger things. A mix of the surreal and the mundane, these short fictions deal with father-daughter relationships, communication, and intellect, sometimes discarding conventional grammar in favor of a language of emotion.”
Read More“The Short stories in A Servant's Map of the Body Stories by leave an impression that the American short-story writers are unique and excellent. The author reveals solitude and sorrow in their short stories, reminding us of Richard Yates' (1926-1992) collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962).”
Read More“Tunneling to the Moon: A Psychological Gardener's Book of Days draws from fairy tales, a condescending of a 1938 Social Studies reader for 6th grade, an 1890 handbook on marital compatibility, numerous annoying educational advancement studies, the myths and legends of third-world countries and minority peoples, pulp fiction, a history of carnival side shows, folktales, frequent conversations with Crows, Owls and a wide variety of underground inhabitants, insects and the people who collect them, Joseph Cornell, Günter Eich, Russell Edson, the French Surrealist poets, the Quay Brothers, letterpress printing, and the author's inability to channel his imagination linearly.”
Read More“Doctor Scream, American billionaire, is in Ireland to set up a Donut Factory. He’s got permission from the Irish government to put his workers on drugs for a year. The drug Scream has developed, The Donut Hole, enables people to work longer, stronger and faster. It also sharpens their intelligence like a pencil parer. Or so he claims.”
Read More“If you've always suspected that something was missing from and not quite right with modern fiction, you'll be glad all over to read the following lightbulber; you were right all along. Therefore, swallow the red pill by taking Camillus John's jazzy hand in yours on his Pervert's Guide to Modern Fiction for over three hundred transgressive pages.”
Read More“With long gold trumpets and short tight trousers Ballyer Press introduces Camillus John's sixth book, a collection of flash fiction, Shyness Is Lice. Fictionmongery of the tip toppest. From the wild frontiers of alternative literature.”
Read More“Sara Brody thought she had met her soulmate in Tad Bolak, a charming exchange student. Their whirlwind romance includes nights staring at the stars, declarations of love, and promises to talk often when Tad must return to his native Poland to complete his Master’s Degree. But Sara’s idealistic view of Tad and plans to be together when he gets his degree come to a shattering halt when he admits to having a fiancee back home.”
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