Monday, February 28, 2011

DOGZPLOT MIDWEST DOGGYSTYLE STREET CAMPAIGN 2011


Last year, 2010, your support of DOGZPLOT / ACHILLES CHAPBOOKS / PAPER HERO PRESS helped take us all across the U.S.A. with stops in New York City, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Baltimore, D.C., Philadelphia, Denver, Chicago, and everywhere in between.

This year we plan to visit even more cities and publish even more titles, beginning with the DOGZPLOT 2011 FLASH FICTION ANTHOLOGY, BEN TANZER's, THIS AMERICAN LIFE, and COREY MESLER's, THE NARCOLEPTIC THERAPIST. We plan on reading and exhibiting with our editors and authors all across the MIDWEST this year, with stops in Toledo, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Iowa City, and several stops in between.

Additionally, this summer, we will also feature the release of DOGZPLOT editor, BARRY GRAHAM's novel NOTHING OR NEXT TO NOTHING.

But this year we need you even more. If you believe in what we do and our contribution to literature, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE help us raise money through KICKSTARTER. We are asking for minimal donations, with multiple rewards and incentives. Please and thank you.
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And if you feel so inclined, we would greatly appreciate if you could spread the word and spread this link anywhere and everywhere you can.

Here's the link to our project page on KICKSTARTER:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dogzplot/dogzplot-authors-book-tour

Saturday, February 26, 2011

WHAT TO WEAR DURING AN ORANGE ALERT. ROBERT JOHN MILLER


Thanks to JASON BEHRENDS for giving DOGZPLOT a shout out on THE WATCH LIST over at WHAT TO WEAR DURING AN ORANGE ALERT. He graciously included ROBERT JOHN MILLER's flash LOVE AND LAUNDRY AND OUTER SPACE from last week's issue. Also included on THE WATCH LIST are:

Listening:
1. Ben Butler & Mousepad: This duo is making some very original sounds.
2. Selene: This a combination of Richard Rich and Max Tannone paying tribute to the movie "Moon". Download the free 5-song ep.
3. Dad Rocks!: This Icelandic/Danish band could not have thought of better name.

Reading:
1. Love and Laundry and Outer Space by Robert John Miller
2. Deeee-lish! by Rupan Malakin
3. Eco-Fiction by D.E.Fredd
4. Posthumous Fragments of Veronica Penn by Corinna Vallianatos
5. The Girlfriend Game by Nick Antosca
6. My Blood Flow Runs in Reverse by Sabra Embury
7. Smiling to Himself by Ben Tanzer

Wishing
:
1. The Iguana Complex by Darby Larson
2. Hipster Bingo

Watching:
1. Victim by Corrie Jones
2. Pazes "Evaporar"
3. Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros "40 Day Dream"
4. Moddi "Rubbles"
5. Organizing The Bookcase


Thanks again Jason, you da man.

Friday, February 25, 2011

LITERARY DOPPELGANGERS. ADAM ROBINSON. JOHN BERRYMAN.


So, I ripped the idea off of JIMMY CHEN over at HTMLGIANT, but when I saw this picture of ADAM ROBINSON I couldn't resist.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

LITERARY HAPPENINGS. BUFFALO SMALL PRESS BOOK FAIR. JAMIE IREDELL. MIKE YOUNG


MORE STUFF TO READ. XTX. MONKEYBICYCLE


“After reading Normally Special, if I knew xTx’s legal name, I’d file a restraining order. Maybe she’s Aileen Wuornos. Maybe she’s a wiccan living under A.M. Homes’s bed. I don’t know, she freaks me the hell out. “You should be glad I cannot tie knots or have access to a gun safe,” she writes in the last of these 23 texts, each somehow both demented and courageous, desperate and ready to brawl. I’d be glad of that if I believed it; you can practically smell the rope burn on the skin coming off these ransom letter sex threats. I’m leaving the door unlocked. ”
Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year

xTx’s stories embody the terrors, wounds and deep emotions that tremor through our bodies as we walk around in our daily lives, pretending everything is alright. Nothing is alright of course, but xTx turning our hidden selves into meaningful stories helps a whole hell of a lot.
Paula Bomer, author of Baby



With stories and poems from 22 groundbreaking authors, Monkeybicycle8 is sure to please. Featuring cinema stars, cave-dwelling hermits, imaginary monsters, Internet hookups, and so much more, this issue packs a mighty wallop.

Contributors: Summer Block, Matt Briggs, Aaron Burch, E. Michael Desilets, Ori Fienberg, Jesús Ángel García, Scott Geiger, Michael Hickins, Steve Himmer, Blake Kimzey, Ben Loory, Annam Manthiram, Laura McCullough, Michael Mlekoday, Dustin Luke Nelson, Ben Nickol, Steve Peacock, Jonathan Redhorse, Vincent Scarpa, Curtis Smith, Rosalynn Stovall, and Andrew Weatherhead.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

FREE FLASH COMEDY CD. REVELATIONS: A PURGATORY PREVIEW. PETER SCHWARTZ


PETER SCHWARTZ
REVELATIONS: A PURGATORY PREVIEW
FLASH COMEDY
9 AUDIO TRACKS

REVELATIONS: A PURGATORY PREVIEW
 
1. Late money
2. Fake karate
3. Tranny shenanigans
4. Testicle dispute
5. Hostile hypnosis takeover attempt
6. Anal meaning
7. Bullshit story
8. Bed time story
9. The unofficial guide to using time travel to avoid being molested

This FLASH COMEDY cd is available for free with the purchase of any DOGZPLOT / PAPER HERO PRESS / ACHILLES CHAPBOOK / PETER SCHWARTZ / BARRY GRAHAM title. Just shoot us an email and forward the receipt and it's all good baby baby.

Here's what people have been saying about PETER SCHWARTZ and his poetry, prose, art, and comedy:

The first time I met Peter Schwartz I was scheduled to follow him at a reading and he went from reciting poetry to belting out a quite emotional rendition of "Amazing Grace". My first thought was, what a f**ker, I’m supposed to follow that? My second thought though was this guy may be a f**ker, but he’s definitely my kind of f**ker and I need to get to know him. What has since transpired are a series of e-mails that have confirmed my initial suspicions. Peter Schwartz is a funny, talented, pop-culture spewing dude who is maybe just a little f**ked-up. He is also someone you need to know…Peter himself, is wonderful and heavy, in love with words and endlessly searching to make better sense of confinement and loss and their impact on his life.”
Ben Tanzer, author of You Can make Him Like You, This American Life, and My Father’s House

“Peter Schwartz’s poems collect our hard-won confessions, our fragile constructions, our temporary homes and our more permanent losses, but not for the purpose of hoarding them away. Instead, Schwartz organizes these obsessions into new structures–complex and beautiful poems–inviting us to experience their transformations.”
- Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found, and The Collectors

Throughout the proceedings, Schwartz presents a host of lonely, psychologically damaged characters, all of whom seek comfort in the company of others yet, tragically, lack the capacity to connect in a meaningful way.
- Marc Schuster, Small Press Review, and author of The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl

“…at times it’s almost as if Schwartz’s pen is spilling out of control, words all-a-tumble but it’s very tightly written, giving the sequence a powerful sense of cohesion, unifying the narrator’s concern across the series… Nowhere does the language feel contrived or artificial. Schwartz’s manner of naming illustrates the immanence, plurality and many contradictions inherent within the nature of divinity, sometimes unusual and surprising but always appropriate.”
- Alan Garvey, Gloom Cupboard

Saturday, February 19, 2011

INTERVIEW. ALT.PUNK. LAVINIA LUDLOW


LAVINIA LUDLOW
ALT.PUNK
CASPERIAN BOOKS


Fiction • Paperback • 204 pages
ISBN 978-1-934081-29-7 • List Price: $15.00

We Need a Cleanup on Aisle Five

Hazel is a middle-class hypochondriac doing (over)time as a manager at Safeway, the only place that would hire her with an MBA from a state school. She hates her boyfriend, her family, and her life.

Otis is a guiltless weirdo who still has action figures in his bed; a postindustrial Peter Pan who wakes up in the middle of the night crying from nightmares he can't remember. A punk rock void, he describes the world with the creative imagination of a child. Together, they are a disaster.

In alt.punk, Lavinia Ludlow explores the ragged edge of art, society, and sanity, viciously skewering the politics of rebellion. With a savage eye for detail, she unveils the layers of mythmaking that underlie class and ideology in the twenty-first century.

A review of alt.punk from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.

Based on its title and cover, it'd be natural to assume that Lavinia Ludlow's literary debut alt.punk is going to be a sort-of tell-all novel about the music industry, especially given the author's past as a drummer for various bands herself. But this instead turns out to be a more interesting and charming thing, a confessional-style tale (i.e. it feels like you're sneakily reading someone's blog) about our sympathetic but undeniably trainwrecky narrator, as she stumbles in and out of a series of nightmare relationships with barely functioning grimy musicians in the San Francisco/Sacramento area of northern California, while constantly fending off comments about her weight and career from her dysfunctional family, accepting pent-up abuse from retail flunkies in her job as a pharmacy manager, and OCD-obsessing over germs and cleanliness so incessantly that it makes Woody Allen seem well-adjusted. As such, then, alt.punk is surprisingly funny while still being utterly relentless in its abuse, both self- and outer- in nature, an extremely true-feeling tale that nonetheless veers into cartoonish exaggeration at points (oy vey, all those descriptions of her boyfriend's "Grey Gardens" style nightmare apartment). Fascinating like a car crash, this was one of the rare books I found myself literally unable to put down until I had finished it (thankfully only later that night, in that this 200-page novel is quite breezy), another winner from the regularly reviewed Casperian Books that is well worth your time and money. It comes highly recommended to my fellow artsy slackers.

Lavinia Ludlow was born and raised in Northern California. A percussionist since childhood, she has played with different ensembles in California and Hawaii and immerses herself in music when not writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Pear Noir!, Is Greater Than, Dogzplot, and MonkeyBicycle. alt.punk is her first novel.


HERE'S THE INTERVIEW

BG : For me, ALT.PUNK is a tale of brutally honest, fatalistic, twenty-first century American Naturalism. I can’t help but feel that Hazel’s entire existence is preordained, that her germophobic, socially inept personality and her narrow, semi-elitist world view were shaped well before she was conceived, and a job at Safeway and her frustrating habit of returning again and again to the same deadbeat boyfriends are all part of her inescapable destiny. Tell me why this is or is not a good assessment?

LL: You couldn’t have assessed the protagonist in a more anal, undignified, and dysfunctional manner. It was dead-on.

I’ve always wanted to write a story about a bitter and jaded suburbanite putting down the unproductive complaining and taking action. My intent was to instill melodramatic teenage angst into a character that was well into adulthood, and put her in the middle of a dark-humored fast-paced entertaining novel.

In this story, Hazel tucked balls into her big girl panties and got the hell out of her dead end lifestyle. Naturally, without meticulous planning, everything blew chunks in her face.

BG: In Hazel, we find a woman who sees salmonella poisoning in every bite of food, AIDS in every mosquito bite, and makes any potential sex partner show her lab results for STD tests before sexual contact, so I think it’s fair to call her a bit of a hypochondriac. As I was reading I couldn’t help but wonder how much of Hazel’s personality comes from Lavinia. Are you a germ freak? Have you ever gotten the shit kicked out of you by any punks? Is your mother sadistic? Do you have bad taste in men? Do you make them show you STD tests? Give me the inside dope. And what about Hazel’s ex-boyfriends in ALT.PUNK, are they inspired by Lavinia’s ex-boyfriends?

LL: This is a work of fiction. How dare you believe I’m a tight-ass with bad taste in men. I mean, all my last boyfriend did was sell and use drugs, get drunk and violent, brag about prison, and borrow money from me to squander on Vegas whores. Come on, bad taste in men?

All jokes aside, I knew I needed to construct a powerful voice that fit the needs of the novel. Hazel was a tragically comical anal-retentive product of suburbia. I put a lot of research into her personality disorder, so in no way am I a germaphobic freak. But after all that research I am more aware than ever of STDs and microbes. I mean, is two minutes of sloppy drunk unsatisfying sex worth a lifetime of herpes or HIV?

Maybe ignorance is bliss.


BG: It seems that Hazel was fed up with her day to day life and her mundane job at Safeway for quite awhile before she finally quit and went on the punk rock tour with her boyfriend Otis. So what was the catalyst for making her quit when she did? What was her breaking point? It seems she had access to crazy men, drugs, and the punk lifestyle anytime she wanted through other Safeway employees and her best friend Avaline, so why did she make the change when she did?

LL: For some, turning thirty is huge. I know I’ll have some sort of episode when I round that corner. I might shave my head. Live off the grid. Or maybe I’ll write another novel.

For Hazel, it was a combination of turning thirty, believing the next conventional step would be to get married, crap out some kids, and live with an unremitting retail headache. Though she was angst-ridden and hypocritical, deep down, she knew there was something wrong with her life choices. Ultimately, she snaps.

BG: When Hazel leaves her job and goes on tour with her boyfriend Otis, a suicidal, drug addicted front man for a punk band, where does her interest, and ultimately intense devotion to Otis come from? There is nothing in Hazel’s personality that would indicate that she has the character to deal with someone like Otis. He is helpless, needy, and yeah, the drugs and suicide, so what is it? What makes her stick around? Is it just a “fuck you to the family,” boredom, an escape from her longtime, unemployed, unmotivated boyfriend Kree?

LL:
Hazel wanted to prove that she wasn’t a naïve suburbanite that chose wrong. And in a way, I think she likes him. I mean, who wouldn’t like someone as adorable as Otis with all his helplessness and addictions and weird sex? I get hard just thinking about it.

BG: I can’t help but feel that there is some sort of underlying New Testament messages of judge not lest ye be judged and that which you do returning upon your own head and that which judgment ye meet, ye also will be met, I know my paraphrasing is bad and I’m too lazy to get my Bible out, but I think you know what I mean. Can you elaborate on this at all, and were you conscious of it as you were writing, of the karmic quality to your story and to the characters; lives, relationships, actions and consequences?

LL: I purposely wrote irony into certain aspects of ALT.PUNK. Irony that the punks who were supposed to be so liberal were the most damning. Irony that Otis was a punk but a total pussy. Irony that Hazel was a tight-ass, but of all characters, she introduced the most change into her life.

In terms of consequences, the story took off on its own and became more intense than I intended. And I never realized how much I’d pay later. It’s easy to draft up something dark and extreme, but to have to revise all that darkness a hundred times over is incredibly disturbing. Some days, it would physically hurt me to have to deal with so much addiction, depression, and negativity. I never want to relive what I went through to get this to print.

That being said, I wouldn’t take it back. Not to mooch off Ben Tanzer, but publishing this novel changed my life. I was at the rock bottom of rock bottom when Casperian Books accepted the manuscript. I was unemployed, crashing on a couch, chronically inebriated, lost in a mental standstill. Preparing this novel for publication forced me to get my shit together. I had to find a source of income. I had to clean up. I had to get sober.

When I was paired up with Nathan Holic, the editor behind ALT.PUNK, I was working seventy hours a week, on the road for fifteen, completing community college online classes, and editing the hell out of the broken manuscript. Thinking back, if I could rise above, multitask all of the above, and come out well adjusted then there is no excuse for me to entertain the thought of rock bottom again.

I don’t think I answered your question but ALT.PUNK was a wild ride that truly saved my life.


BG: You know, it’s absolutely inevitable that if Hazel ever has children she will be just as cruel and viscous to them as her mother was to her; that her children will end up with all the same psychological hang-ups and social inadequacies as she has. Am I being too hard on Hazel? Is there hope? Convince me.

LL:
Hazel on a cocktail of downers and booze is pretty badass. There’s a closet raunch in her somewhere. In terms of children, let us leave the novel where it ends. Like many dysfunctional people (and one that I am), she shouldn’t entertain the idea of kids just yet.

WE GOT THE CLAP







Wednesday, February 16, 2011

BEN TANZER. THIS AMERICAN LIFE. ACHILLES CHAPBOOK SERIES

Coming soon from ACHILLES CHAPBOOK SERIES

BEN TANZER
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
60 PGS.
STORIES

http://achilleschapbook.blogspot.com/2009/05/ben-tanzer.html

"If I want to think of sharply written stories that capture a humorous reality of the day-to-day I think of Ben Tanzer. Or if I just want to think about one of my favorite underappreciated writers, I think of Ben Tanzer."
- Josh Spilker, Deckfight

"Something that's always consistently impressed me about Ben's writing -- his willingness to dig under the polite layers of young middle-class life, to find the ugly and dark bits and hold them up for all of us to look at."
- Jason Pettus, CCLaP

NEW FROM ML PRESS. NEPHEW IMPRINT SERIES. DARBY LARSON. THE IGUANA COMPLEX




From ML PRESS

Nephew, an imprint of Mud Luscious Press, publishes raw & aggressive pocket-sized titles in limited-editions of 150 copies or for a sales period of three months, whichever comes first. There will be no subsequent editions.

There is Only One Thing We Want to Say Right Now,

Mud Luscious Press has officially launched the imprint series Nephew: perfect-bound, pocket-sized, raw & aggressive titles published in limited-editions of 150 copies or for a sales period of three months, whichever comes first, & there will be no subsequent editions of any Nephew title, ever.

Our first book is Darby Larson’s THE IGUANA COMPLEX, a wonder of negation & meta-narrative, a mountain of little steps walking in circles. Larson has had short fiction published recently at The Collagist, Everyday Genius, Caketrain, & New York Tyrant. He is also the editor of Abjective. This is his first book.

$10, free shipping, 150 copies or 90 days, whichever comes first.

www.mudlusciouspress.com/nephew/