Ambiguity by Frederick Mark Kramer

“Get it up!” demands the narrator of Frederick Mark Kramer’s new novel, “Ambiguity,” of himself as he lies down to rest, as if his sexual energy could save him. However, for Kramer’s narrator, Darko, sexual energy alone, although it abounds in Darko’s memory, cannot save him. This is a novel about breath, or, as Darko calls it, “the pneuma.” Darko says that “the pneuma can mean the breath of life or the destruction of life,” and in between is where this novel takes place. Clearly Darko uses his entire life as his inspiration here, “inspiration” meaning “breathing in.” Then Darko recounts this life in ten paragraphs that are gymnastic and acrobatic and celebrate corporeal existence. This is the “perspiration,” or the “breathing through” life that Darko has exercised. His ten paragraphs, though, are ten breaths, ten exhalations, leading to a final “breathing out,” or “expiration,” as he takes to his bed, exhausted, demanding of himself a new beginning, not just the release of orgasm, but the orgasmic seeding of new life, a creative re-fertilization of the world and the rebirth of oneself.  As always, Kramer is both resolutely readable and profoundly resonant in his work.  Those familiar with his masterful novel“Apostrophe/Parenthesis” will find in “Ambiguity” that Kramer has produced another masterpiece that rivals the best works of anyone. —Eckhard Gerdes, author of My Landlady the Lobotomist and Cistern Tawdry

Buy Ambiguity, available through Amazon.

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        Best Behavior by Noah Cicero

Best Behavior, the new novel by Noah Cicero, is his boldest work yet. As the subject matter becomes increasingly autobiographical, the landscape more bleak, its impact is blunt, brutal, but somehow still hilarious. This is the literature of pain: of living in a world where nothing is right–a temple to capitalism with no room for any kind of human spirit–and, despite everything, trying to find some way to deal with it; then eventually failing. Best Behavior might be the truest story ever told.

Best Behavior is slice-of-life, and that’s as it should be. Where the classics have beginnings, middles, and ends that are relevant to the mainstream consciousness of the times, Best Behavior is a couple of days in the life, making it a more honest and useful cultural artifact. — Rebecca Haze.

In Best Behavior Noah Cicero tells a story that works on the precise level I can relate to. Every page speaks to me in his own words. He doesn’t bother making shit up. He says what he thinks needs to be said and then he moves forward from there. — Michael Davidson.

The story is told in sharp sentences that still manage to ramble, like Hemingway.  It deals with a dream after the fact.  It’s like waking up from a dream.  The background is that the narrator thought he would/could possibly be a writer, as a “profession.”  Five years after the publication of his first book, that’s still not the case.  This isn’t surreal though.  This is real.  He wanted to feel at home in NYC.  But he can’t.  He feels at home in Youngstown.  But he doesn’t really feel at home there.  He doesn’t feel at home anywhere really.  And that is what makes this an American narrative. — Andrew Worthington.

        About the author:

Noah Cicero is the author of The Human War (Fugue State Press, 2003), The Condemned (Six Gallery Press, 2006),Burning Babies (Parlor Press, 2006), Treatise (A-Head Publishing, 2008), and The Insurgent (Blatt, 2010). Since its release, The Human War has become a favorite of the literary underground and is being adapted to film. This is his sixth novel.

Buy Best Behavior, available through Amazon.

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        Fires by Nick Antosca

Deer running through a ghost neighborhood. A boy trapped in a basement for eight years. Three young people locked in a violent sex triangle. Come inside. Already caught between the ambition and alienation of life at an Ivy League school, Jon Danfield must come face to face with a revelation about his small-town past. His journey will take him away from the halls of privilege and into the heart of the monstrous forest fire threatening his childhood home. On deserted suburban streets lined with perfect houses, Danfield must confront an American dream corroded by unspeakable acts of cruelty.

Includes additional short fiction from the author: “Girlfriend Game“, “Rat Beast“, and “Winter was Hard.”

Fires is a novel full of creeping menace and near-apocalyptic lunacy . . . the book is a blast to read. –Victor LaValle, author of The Ecstatic

Fires is a striking work reminiscent of James Salter (A Sport and a Pastime) in its combination of a cool unforgiving eye and a hot intensity of feeling and sensual immediacy. –John Crowley, author of Little, Big

Fires is fantastic. It’s often dark, often startlingly beautiful, and it’s crammed with a smoky, foreboding atmosphere that kept pulling me along, thrilled and a little scared, toward the end. –Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin

Buy Fires, available through Amazon.

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        Hugh Moore by Eckhard Gerdes

If ever a novel was appropriately named, Hugh Moore is it. At the center of the novel is the titular character, as humor is at the center of the novel.  The occasion for humor is the gathering of the tribes for the funeral (and presumed ascension) of the family matriarch, Rose Moore. The list of attendees goes on and on, and each has to survive some odd adventure or two in order to make it to the funeral.  Beneath the humor, each character has to come to terms with life and death in his or her own way, as is befitting the occasion.  Hugh, himself, is the family scribe, a humorist and aspiring novelist, who takes it upon himself to record the family get-together.  Unfortunately, he is living below a newspaper man named Jackson Berlin.  Jackson is not known for his sense of humor and does not suffer the shenanigans of his downstairs neighbor lightly.  Before too long, the two writers are at war with each other, and Jackson makes full use of his superior position. Hugh Moore is, simply put, the funniest novel since Moby Dick.

Funny, mischievous, riotously re-Joycean, Hugh Moore’s protagonists are ultimately language and form themselves, its plot how they continuously surprise and delight while showing us how we’re all filled with others trying to write our books, and how real love arrives, both inside and outside word worlds, not through work, but play. –Lance Olsen

It is the language that abides Hugh throughout his novel – and let there be no mistake, this is Hugh’s novel – that forms the plot itself.  Shards of Joycean intent pursue Hugh like mean will-o-the-wisps right over every page, catching him brightly at regular intervals, piercing him at just the right depth to draw his inky blood without killing him and ending his story right then and there.  Inky blood – yes, for that is what Hugh is; he is the whole damn history of writing and creative malcontent, right to the very last page where it is made quite clear his one guiding inspiration for his art, that higher ideal that shines on no matter the filth of all else, that one wholesome principle we each possess that keeps us all tender and sane when by rights we should all be castration-mad and dirty ugly.  As to what form exactly Hugh’s inspiration takes, well, in order to master that you’ll first have to master the lessons that Hugh provides as he teaches his honours class in writing. –Dominic Ward

A writer clearly impatient with the currently devalued trends of modern fiction. His work is a fresh wind. I congratulate Gerdes on raising this particular storm. –Michael Moorcock

Buy Hugh Moore, available through Amazon.

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        Paris 60 by Harold Jaffe

The entries that constitute Paris 60 were recorded daily during Harold Jaffe’s Spring 2008 Paris visit to greet the translation into French of one of his earlier volumes. Based loosely on Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, 1896, Paris 60 is both factual and fictionalized. Baudelaire was Parisian. Although a frequent visitor, usually for professional reasons, Jaffe is a self-acknowledged outsider, and his texts are written from that position.

Paris 60, like a tuning fork, touches on  this note, over and over, and applies it to our elbows and knees, making us react. Our arms and legs come to life in response. We are  activated by the strength of Jaffe’s prose and the acuity of his  observations. To be a responsible reader, you must read Paris 60. You are still permitted to write and paint and dance as you wish  because a few brave artists like Jaffe stood their ground and said, “never again.” —Eckhard Gerdes

Paris 60, Harold Jaffe’s brilliant, revelatory sequence of meditations (essays, fictions, prose poems) about Paris as he found it in 2008, is an essential guidebook for today’s true travelers to the City of Lights. There won’t be a better book by a US writer published in 2010.  It should be praised, studied, bought by the truckload. —Tom Whalen

I did not think an American writer could startle me with his wry insights into French culture (in the broadest arc from food and erotic deviation to contemporary philosophy and Parisian bucal contortions) but Harold Jaffe does! Particularly startling is the sudden eruption—through the lucid, impeccable essay surface—of fictional characters and events, as though these could no longer be held back, making of Jaffe doubtlessly one of our most original essayists. —Alain Arias-Misson

Buy Paris 60, available through Amazon.

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        Short Tails by Yuri Tarnawsky

A body gradually shrinks to an eye that sees its own end. A man screams with pain as if singing an Indian raga to entertain others for a pittance.  Another man tries to force his body to adapt the shape of a cube because of the cleverly witty name his parents gave him.  Still another one thinks he has died and came back to earth as a wisp of smoke, distraught by a series of mundane mishaps that can befall everyone these days.  A mismatched couple, like actors in a Greek tragedy, play a kinky sex game to relieve themselves of their neuroses.  And finally a resident of Lisbon is ordered to take the yellow streetcar, as everyone in the end is, and obediently plunges together with it into the emptiness before him on reaching the Atlantic.

You won’t find any facile tall-tale lies designed to titillate the reader in these twenty-four “prose pieces.”  A masterful storyteller that he is, Yuriy Tarnawsky has fashioned for us a unified novel-like narration about the absurd nature of human life out of painful truths which couldn’t have been easy for him to discover.

If you leave your house without a plan, you might end up in a Yuriy Tarnawsky story. Just like the clueless innocent exiles of Kafka and Nabokov’s early stories, the citizens of (mostly New York) in Tarnawsky’s world are yanked from routine and cast into exciting and cruel situations. The distance from which the writer views his subjects is unique: they are neither inside themselves, nor in the world they think they are. At the same time they are inside themselves but, as it turns out, they don’t know enough to know what that inside is, and they discover that the world they thought they lived in has an unexpected dimension, like an extra room in their own house in a dream. A painter might translate Tarnawsky’s into a very interesting new perspective, but the light in the stories is sharp enough to make the painter redundant. –Andrei Codrescu, author of “whatever gets you through the night: a story of sheherezade and the arabian entertainments.”

Equally ludic, lunatic, and brilliant, these fictions form an incandescent poetry of the impossible that teaches us again and again how our world—designed by Escher, dreamed by Gogol via Kafka—is a succession of abrupt wrenches and unnerving complexities.  Yuriy Tarnawsky is a master of the avant-irreal.  —Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets.

“…moments spent with a person one enjoys so much that each of them brings pain at the thought it will not last forever.”  the narrator in one of these “tails” tells us.  And so this is what we feel about each of these strong, reckless fictions as it spirals off into its enigmas human and cosmic.  The author rises on these vortices to brush shoulders with Gogol, Stein, Kafka, Carver, Hauser, Shulz.  So different from Meningitis, Three Blondes and Death, or the mini-novels, it will drive you to read them again.  But do not delay. Read this wonderful book. –Steve Katz, author of Kissssssssssss.

        About the author:

Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored twenty collections of poetry, seven plays, eight books of fiction, a biography, and numerous articles and translations. He was born in Ukraine but raised and educated in the West.  A linguist by training, he has worked as computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and as professor of Ukrainian literature at Columbia University.  He writes in Ukrainian and English.

His books include the novels Meningitis and Three Blondes and Death as well as a collection of mininovels Like Blood in Water, all from FC2, and Ukrainian Dumy, a translation of Ukrainian epic poetry published by Harvard University.

Buy Short Tails, available through Amazon.

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        Sunshine in the Valley by Kyle Muntz

Sunshine in the Valley is about the creation of life after the extinction of time. Taking place in a village surrounded by living walls, in which existence has become a frame of mind, a way of thinking, the narrative centers around a group of “childlike entities” whose age, like most everything in the world around them, eventually gets brought into question. Everything is alien, strange, and beautiful, as if written in hieroglyphics, illuminated by light, within a framework of existential clarity—or, perhaps, the shadow of that clarity, stipulated by its absence.

Its metalogic moves and Hericlitean universe make Kyle Muntz’s “Sunshine in the Valley” avant-garde science fiction at its most disconcerting and energizing. —Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets

Come one, come all! Enter the fantastical world of Kyle Muntz’s “Sunshine in the Valley”, where touch makes flowers sprout from imminent death, music knits an invisible girl with its shadow melody, and characters tumble to their demise and back again. Here is a world of too many rules and not enough. Here is a world that can make even the most sinister and beautiful fairy tale shudder with envy. —Lily Hoang, author of The Evolutionary Revolution

        About the author:

Kyle Muntz is the author of Voices (Enigmatic Ink, 2010), Sunshine in the Valley (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2011), and VII(Enigmatic Ink, 2012). He is interested in the literature of aesthetic and ideas.

Buy Sunshine in the Valley, available through Amazon.

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        The Day We Delay by Michael J Seidlinger

“The Day We Delay is ambitious, challenging, and intensely cerebral.  Michael J Seidlinger writes for the aspiring rat in all of us, building mysterious and puzzling catacombs of language.  You never know what the next page is going to look like, where the next corridor is going to lead you, or how disoriented you’re going to get, but you will not forget this utterly unique experience. Make sure you apply deodorant.” – Nick Antosca, author of Midnight Picnic.

“Michael J Seidlinger writes, ‘It begins with the debut – the courageous must tear down the preceding blockades with a crippling catastrophe.’ To which I respond: It begins here, with this debut novel – the author courageously tearing down the preceding traditions with a formally crippling and linguistically catastrophical adventure.” – Lily Hoang, author of Parabola.

“Seidlinger’s novel reminds us what it is to write with a blade. While so many other readers are clustering round the hind of books to make a gravity well of contempt for bold adventurism in writing, The Day We Delay is both vertiginous and visceral, a scorching indictment of contemporary mores in that computer prompt domain where the poetic is sundered by a Cuisinart of literary static.” – Kane X. Faucher, author of The Infinite Library.

“The Day We Delay dares the reader to understand it, and by doing so urges a reevaluation of the traditional understanding of narrative as a vehicle for empathy. Seidlinger’s fiction is instead a vehicle by which we search for the basis of our assumed need for human connection. The Day We Delay is a coded manifesto as labyrinthine and full of possibilities as the empty high-rise that anchors the book’s opening pages.” – Caleb J Ross, author of Stranger Will.

“The Day We Delay is a character sketch of our generation—a meditation on consumerism revealing not just the failings of the system itself, but the extent to which it dehumanizes and destroys the real people involved. Seidlinger’s writing, as ever, is impossibly virtuosic and absolutely inimitable. The result is an ode to the murder of capitalism both unnerving and eerily familiar, ‘the insistence that there was something to find once… and there will be again, if there is time.’” – Kyle Muntz, author of Sunshine in the Valley.

“In The Day We Delay, a sprawling philosophical fable on how to live (or not) as a 21st century Man of (in)Action, Michael J. Seidlinger maps the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of every waking moment. There’s an urgency here to be, i.e. to do—something, anything—with the (over)thinking mind (hyper)focused on status and the legend of legacy as frontline means of (dis)engagement. And who will you be today? The beautiful, the courageous, the majority, the reticent? Either/and/or, we’re all extras in the end. How then to be viable in body and soul? There is only go(ne).” – Jesús Ángel García, author ofbadbadbad.

Buy The Day We Delay, available through Amazon.

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        The Infinite Library by Kane X Faucher

Follow Alberto Gimaldi, code-cracker and bibliophile, as he unravels the mystery of an infinite library and discovers the treachery of the librarian Castellemare. What is the hidden plot of the library, and how will this impossible place set into motion a catastrophic narrative by the artful textual manipulation of unwitting agents in the real world? What is the buried and secret connection between all text and all life?

A novel of dark mystery, infinity, and a compelling story for all those who love books and book-related enigmas. Codes, ciphers, and the sinister await those who would set foot inside the Infinite Library.

        About the author:

Kane X. Faucher is the author of several novels and has been a regular contributor to a few international magazines. His works are a mix of the absurd, the comical, and the critical, generally involving themes of language, media, contemporary art, and libraries. His prose style is slightly elevated and satirically snide.

He is also known for his expertise in rhetoric and propaganda studies, and publishes articles on Borges, Deleuze, social media, and Celine. He is an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario.

Buy The Infinite Library, available through Amazon.

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        The Narrator by Michael Cisco

The Narrator—the new novel by Michael Cisco, author of The Traitor and The Divinity Student—is also his most sophisticated. Cisco’s prose, by turns phantasmagorical and exhilarating (reminiscent one moment of Robbe-Grillet, the next of Artaud, with a tinge of Thomas Ligotti, the imaginative virtuosity of Gene Wolfe or M. John Harrison), is like a stark sequence of strong iron bars, brimming with dark ambiance. Combining unmatched craft with masterful storytelling, this is literate fantasy unlike any other, intricate as the most elaborate dream, in which the narrator himself is the most ambiguous thing of all.

If William Burroughs was helping Cormac McCarthy rewrite Blood Meridian as dark fantasy, it might look something like this.  The Narrator is wonderfully grotesque and slippery book, a meditation on the nature of violence chock-full of palpable, haunting and shocking strangeness. –Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State

Cisco wields words in sweeping, sensual waves, skillfully evoking multiple layers of image and metaphore… a gem of literate dark fantasy, concisely illustrating the power, both light and dark, of words and meaning. –Publisher’s Weekly

A festival of unrealities, and entrancing body of hallucinations mutilated with surgical precision by a masterful literary maniac. –Thomas Ligotti, author of The Nightmare Factory and Theatro Gottesco

Michael Cisco’s meticulously imagined new-goth dreamtime is a somberly menacing thing conjured by Borges channeling Kafka channeling Browning that teaches us again and again just how continent the universe really can be. Duck and cover. –Lance Olsen, author of Nietsche’s Kisses and Head In Flames

Buy The Narrator, available through Amazon.

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        The Sky Conducting by Michael J Seidlinger

   America died

while no one was looking.

All that remains is the skeleton of a land riddled with demise and what had once been referred to as domestic symmetry: those commodities we once called our friends, our colleagues, our neighbors.

People have fled the land in massive pilgrimages with little more than a moment’s mourning; but one family has remained within their home, unable to move on. In order to have a second chance, they first need to figure out how to fill the hole America left in their lives.

When there is nothing left, they look up to the sky conducting patterns across time. They admire its loyalty and pull hope from the cumulus clouds before they drift apart and disappear. They want to let go.

Might they find closure in the clouds?

This is the obscure voice-over for the back-alley director’s cut of our lives as American actors. And the cameras are still rolling. –Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory, All the Beautiful Sinners, and Zombie Bake-off.

Seidlinger’s The Sky Conducting charges and hums, a post-apocalyptic dreamscape of family and America and hope caked with ash and buried beneath the malls and the mud, a song of imagination, an indictment of crumbling dogmas, a gentle and savage plaything. Let Seidlinger guide you through the muck and the fear. It’s clear he knows where he’s going. -Mel Bosworth, author of Freight.

Michael Seidlinger’s terrific new novel pruned my skin. Seriously, I was reading it in the bathtub one night and I stayed in the water for a good couple of hours, deeply engrossed. It’s that immersive (so to speak). It also marks a confident new direction in his work. The Sky Conducting is elegant, disturbing, and important. Buy it and read it. –Nick Antosca, author of Fires, Midnight Picnic, and The Obese.

Available March 1st 2012.

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