While I have already expressed my love for Joyce Carol Oates and for Tony O’Neill and Jerry Stahl, all sort of gothic figures in their own right, I have neglected to discuss my other favorite author, Haruki Murakami, and his bizarre, beautiful graceful treatment of the gothic. His amazingly creative stories and phrasing aside, Murakami deals with what feels like a Japanese post-apocalyptic wasteland landscape, something like a deranged mish-mash of New York and Los Angeles that is, however, authentically Japanese.
His books, along with other contemporary Japanese authors, appeal to me because they feel so fresh, just as the American Gothic felt to me as compared to the English when I first discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne. Now we also have the Southern Gothic (Flannery O’Conner, Faulkner, Ahem). I’d like to argue that Murakami and his contemporaries, such as Natsuo Kirino, write in the genre I’ll call the Urban Japanese Gothic Arena—a genre I have just completely made up here.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Ben for getting a free copy of E. E. King’s Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife.
This week, we are giving away a copy ofExtra Indians by Eric Gansworth. Every winter, Tommy Jack McMorsey makes the long haul from Texas to northern Minnesota to watch the meteor showers. One cold night, in a moment of kindness, Tommy picks up a deluded Japanese tourist determined to find the buried ransom money from the movie Fargo. When she dies of exposure in Tommy Jack’s care, a media storm erupts, jarring loose pieces of Tommy Jack’s past: the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend, Fred Howkowski. The story wends between a string of haunting memories and the present: Tommy Jack’s aimless life as truck driver and husband, Fred Howkowski’s thwarted career as an actor in Hollywood, and the return of Tommy Jack’s estranged adoptive son to Big Antler, Texas. Exploring the ways images, stereotypes, and depictions of identity intersect with reality and lived experience, Extra Indians offers a powerful glimpse into contemporary American Indian life. Read an excerpt of Extra Indianshere.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Rose for getting a free copy of 3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale by Danbert Nobacon.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife by E. E. King. In Dirk Quigby, Lucifer needs help. Hell is full and he wants to draw attention to the numerous alternatives available. Out of this dilemma, ad man Dirk gets his dream job: travel to all the Afterlives and report on them for a devilish guidebook. But will he write a bestseller or cause the Apocalypse? Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife is a hilarious, evenhandedly satirical look at all the major religions and many of the minor ones. For all those people who grew up with no particular religion, this is a terrific way to learn about the vast and fascinating range of afterlives. And there are a lot of them. For those people who grew up with a religion, this is a great way to laugh at all the other religions—as long as you carefully skip the section on your own.
Violence doesn’t turn me on. In fact, gore is the fastest way to make me run out of a movie theater crying like a little kid. There are lots of reasons why horror movies don’t do it for me – not the least of which is knowing some dude (because let’s face it, it’s mostly dudes) had to come up with those scenarios – but the long and short of it is, if someone’s getting cut up into little pieces, I’m probably not watching.
That is, until I stumbled upon AMC’s new series “The Walking Dead.”
I didn’t plan on watching it. Too many Facebook status updates happily describing how violent it was had me sure I would never see an episode. But then I got bored. And started writing something that teetered on the supernatural. And since iTunes was letting me download the first episode for so cheap, I decided that watching it on my computer would not only give me some creative ideas, but also allow me to switch to YouTube videos of laughing babies if stuff got too gross. Read more »
The blinds are half-drawn in the retired detective’s office. Two cigarettes smolder in an antique ashtray stolen from The Plaza, no doubt, in better days. The dank bulbs of fluorescent lights blink and bleep with each of the ex- detective’s heavy steps. May as well have been the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. He tore through piles on his metal desk, dinging drawers, feeling for moldy files that probably weren’t even there in the first place. A rattling, and a curvy brunette in a teddy and torn stockings appeared in the corner. “That commode couldn’t service me with my veins pumped full ‘a morphine,” she drawled in an accent every bit Staten Island as Marilyn Monroe…
As you can see, I’ve been reading noir lately. Not the good old classics, which the above text is meant to suggest, but those I’d like to call the “modern noir,” stories with all the pulp and theme told by characters that might have been dreamt up by Hunter S. Thompsonor William S. Burroughs or, frankly, anyone whose lives have been touched by level-5 desperation—something I believe to belong to the noir’s essence. Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Claudia for getting a free copy of Tinkers by Paul Harding.
This week, we are giving away a copy of 3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist’s Fairy Tale by Danbert Nobacon, with illustrations by the filmmaker Alex Cox. In this book, which also features a book by Iggy Pop (!), Princess Stormy lives in a semi-detached castle with her family and a Fool. When an unhappy neighboring kingdom decides to invade, Stormy must go on her quest, meeting giant Cats, Mermangels, Giggle Monkeys, a Gricklegrack, and Flying Lizards on the way. Oh, and she kills three princes. But that’s by accident, and anyway it’s their own fault….Anarchists, progressives, and everyone in the middle will love this fairy tale meant for adults of all ages.
The Brainstormer is an innovative, free web-based idea generator for those plumb out of ideas, so now you have no excuse not to write. At the spin of a (virtual) wheel, the Brainstormer churns out a combination of objects/phrases/ideas, like “colonial dwarf in flight” or “pool hall involving fidelity and enlightenment.” Is it the stuff of great ideas? Uh, maybe. But at least it pushes you through that first hurdle of forcing yourself to actually sit down and write.
For those on the go, it’s also available as an iPhone app.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner B.E. King for getting a free copy of Vestments by John Reimringer.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Tinkers by Paul Harding. In this Pulitzer Prize winning book, an old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer’s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.
Everyone has his or her literary “nerd” moment. You don’t realize how much you truly love the stuff until you do. Like an addict finally “hitting bottom,” the literary nerd moment comes when you least expect it, when you’re set for cruise control, when your eyes are sick and tearing with stretches of nameless, placeless road, somewhere crawling through Nebraska, Iowa, Western Illinois, Central Illinois. Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” scrawls on loop and you have yet to notice the song continues to end and begin again, time and time again. The back seat of the car is full of trash from McDonald’s, Burger King, and oh—Culver’s, from when you did that detour into Wisconsin by mistake (or maybe it was really because your craving for a frozen custard started gnawing away at your soul so savagely you just had to stop at Culver’s). And then, bam! You’re in New York City with a bunch of Jersey plates honking at your back trying to cross the GW.
Violence doesn’t turn me on. In fact, gore is the fastest way to make me run out of a movie theater crying like a little kid. There are lots of reasons why horror movies don’t do it for me – not the least of which is knowing some dude (because let’s face it, it’s mostly dudes) had to come up with those scenarios – but the long and short of it is, if someone’s getting cut up into little pieces, I’m probably not watching.
The blinds are half-drawn in the retired detective’s office. Two cigarettes smolder in an antique ashtray stolen from The Plaza, no doubt, in better days. The dank bulbs of fluorescent lights blink and bleep with each of the ex- detective’s heavy steps. May as well have been the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. He tore through piles on his metal desk, dinging drawers, feeling for moldy files that probably weren’t even there in the first place. A rattling, and a curvy brunette in a teddy and torn stockings appeared in the corner. “That commode couldn’t service me with my veins pumped full ‘a morphine,” she drawled in an accent every bit Staten Island as Marilyn Monroe…
The last post I wrote about gender 
Everyone has his or her literary “nerd” moment. You don’t realize how much you truly love the stuff until you do. Like an addict finally “hitting bottom,” the literary nerd moment comes when you least expect it, when you’re set for cruise control, when your eyes are sick and tearing with stretches of nameless, placeless road, somewhere crawling through Nebraska, Iowa, Western Illinois, Central Illinois. Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” scrawls on loop and you have yet to notice the song continues to end and begin again, time and time again. The back seat of the car is full of trash from McDonald’s, Burger King, and oh—Culver’s, from when you did that detour into Wisconsin by mistake (or maybe it was really because your craving for a frozen custard started gnawing away at your soul so savagely you just had to stop at Culver’s). And then, bam! You’re in New York City with a bunch of Jersey plates honking at your back trying to cross the GW.
