May 09, 2008
May 06, 2008
"I'll kill him." "We'll kill him!"
Dead in Desemboque on sale in a few weeks.
April 29, 2008
With much ado...
...our Fall catalog. Download, check it out and email me a list of review copies, ya know? Cause it's hard to keep track of you fine peops and while I know it's nice to have me break it down, it's also nice for me to discover likes and dislikes of y'all's I'd never known about.
So I promise, in the coming months, to give you the skinny on some of the titles in the catalog, and you guys in exchange tell me what review copies you'd like, and we're golden.
[Oh and on the Counterpoint catalog, I particularly draw your attention to Graham Rawle's illustrated Wizard of Oz, and Miriam Toews's The Flying Troutmans, and My Life at First Try—I acquired the first two...]
April 26, 2008
First instance of Soft Skull book becoming Harvard Business School Case Study...
...ever!
April 23, 2008
Books 'n' brews
Jeff Van der Meer's latest prankish acticity: what beer is your book? This could warrant an entire blog of its own, quite frankly...
March 29, 2008
Curse + Berate in 69 Seconds...
An announcement from our friends and business partners at the Gobshite Quarterly...
Attention all film & video geeks, cinema & film studies majors, videographers & would-be pornographers. (Actual pornographers need not apply.) The sickened & twisted & jaded folks at Gobshite Quarterly are pleased as Plato on percocet to announce a Contest on the Internet.
Rules: To qualify one must submit compressed video files on a compact disc, along with an SASE & cover letter identifying the filmmakers, to:
GobQ LLC, PO Box 11346, Portland OR 97211-0346.
There are three (3) basic rules:
RULE ONE: The film or video (whether 70/35/16/super-8 mm, H-D, x-ray, or kirkian photography) must be no more than sixty-nine (69) seconds long, & no less! Submissions of 68 or 70 seconds shall not qualify. Sixty nine (69) seconds is what entrants MUST aim for, & achieve—whether individuals or teams.
RULE TWO: The content of the film or video can be in any narrative form (dramatic, comedic), whether sketch, puppet show, live action or animé...but the content MUST be based on or inspired by curse + berate in 69+ languages.
RULE THREE: Audio in one of the 69+ languages chosen needs to be provided by native-speakers, or people at least fluent enough not to sound like stroke victims or grade school Spanish teachers . (If this rule is broken it better be broken brilliantly.) Submitted films will be posted on the You-Tube and be judged by a panel including the producer of Ramones' END OF THE CENTURY.
RULE FOUR: The first submission is free. However, multiple submissions must include a $10 entry fee (chk or money order).
FIRST PRIZE: $200, a t-shirt, & a selection of Soft Skull titles.
SECOND PRIZE: $50, a t-shirt, & a selection of Soft Skull titles.
THIRD PRIZE: a t-shirt, & a selection of Soft Skull titles.
Deadline: Films must be submitted by Bastille Day, 2008.
curse + berate in 69+ languages
being a concise compendium + verbal pictionary + day-for-night-book of salaams + salutations + greetings + schadenfreude + unblessings + invective + invidious comparisons + insults + sarcasms + snits + pouts + unkind words + anti-benedictions + obscenities, delicate + indelicate + blasphemies + verbal aggggresssssions + cris-de-coeur + merde-de-jour + esprit de l'escalier + sinister wisdoms + tantrums + thought-crimes + bigotries + dutch courage + tijuana bibles + german sense of humor + aneurysms-for-brunch + sit-next-to-mezes in approx. 90 languages - give or take a dialectic or uncivil war ...
Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages by R. V. Branham
March 27, 2008
The Pisstown Chaos Gratis
By way of building a little buzz in advance of the publication of our brilliant and, shockingly, not-widely-read cult author David Ohle, a free ad-supported eBook:
Advance orders for The Pisstown Chaos were so low last year, I canceled the original May 2007 publication, and tried again, this time for July 2008. And to pull out more stops, this preview eBook.
Here's what folks had to say about his previous installment.
“...if—as was provocatively asserted in Don DeLillo's Mao II—the terrorist has hijacked the novelist's role within our culture, is it then somehow supercilious of me to report that Ohle has written a novel that will behead his readers? ... I’d like to propose that getting your head lopped off by Ohle's fiction is a strange and unforgettable experience....In The Age of Sinatra, Ohle has seemingly concocted some sort of covert Oulipian recipe regarding the fantastic versus realism....Think The Phantom Tollbooth in a Technicolor, head-on collision with the Book of Job....American readers should take note of this insurgent fiction writer, David Ohle, who flays the human condition to singular, hallucinatory effect.”—Village Voice, Best Books of 2004
“A friend from high school once called me in tears: He was trying to make a mobile out of dead bugs but was having trouble bringing them into balance. If he had succeeded, that mobile might resemble this book: delicate and grotesque, tragic and hilarious, precarious but perfectly balanced. . . . The Age of Sinatra, a litany of symptoms, is less like an ordinary novel than it is like a patient history. But those might be the stories we feel most keenly of all.” —Shelley Jackson, Bookforum
“Age of Sinatra is far more consumed with catastrophe than Motorman. The novel advances an anxious investigation into how changes to memories and bodies can affect the state of a mind or the mind of a state. Although much has changed from the age of Nixon to the age of Bush the Younger, Age of Sinatra demonstrates that Ohle continues to construct an intoxicatingly vivid and demented world that is both reflective and revolutionary.” —LA Weekly
“The Age of Sinatra ...stands on its own as a contemporary classic. A word of caution: This book is for very discerning readers only. An engrossing feat of visceral story telling, this dark obsidian humored masterpiece is that x-rated, A-plus and non-plus ultra Twilight Zone episode one fervently hopes will remain fiction." —Rapid River Magazine
“Ohle borrows from conventions of science fiction, mythology, absurdist theater, and political satire to create a destabilizing para-reality: a world to which we expect to be able to relate, only to find it constantly surprising us with characters and ideas that are both disorientingly foreign and piercingly familiar....Tell 10 different people to read this book, and all 10 will say it's about something different. But judging by the response to Ohle's first novel, there is one reaction they are likely to have in common: They'll want to read more.” —Texas Observer
“The legendary author of Motorman is back. In The Age of Sinatra, David Ohle is so attuned to reality that he has invented a brand new world to reflect it. Whereas what is generally called realistic fiction is busy cataloging what we wear and buy, Ohle is documenting our last secrets, and he’s doing it with droll hilarity, brilliance, and a genuinely original vision.” —Ben Marcus
March 23, 2008
The Solitary Vice Miscellany
1. "Early in her erudite and witty new work, Mikita Brottman, a professor of humanities at the Maryland Institute College of Art, notes the recent profusion of "books about books," ranging from lists of books we "must" read before we die to thoughtful studies of the novel by prominent authors like Jane Smiley. But when she starts her own contribution to the genre by provocatively comparing reading with masturbation—"the solitary vice," as it was known in the Victorian Age—we know we're in for a wild literary ride."—Shelf Awareness
2. Brottman acknowledges that nothing has given her pure, unadulterated pleasure as much as reading. For her, reading is an addiction. Like all addictions, it had its downsides, especially during her early years.
"I read all the time, [but] there were some things that reading did for me that were not positive," she said. "It alienated me from my family, and my country. It gave me an idealized picture of romance and what the world was like. And it made me socially dysfunctional."—Interviewed by Geeta Sharma-Jensen in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
3. Author is reading with Eileen Myles and Matthew Sharpe in the inaugural St. Marks Bookshop Reading Series, Thurs, March 27th.
4. Pictures from book party last week at the fabulous Atomic Books in Baltimore.
February 28, 2008
Alex Cox Double-Bill
A double-bill o' bloggers (sublime Lauren and wise Matthew) tell us about a double-bill (Lincoln Center NYC, tonight) of Alex Cox, who attentive readers will recall is to be one of our authors, come August 2008...
February 19, 2008
A new genre—relationships the Soft Skull way
In the manner of a certain familiar throat-clearing: I am sometimes asked what kind of books Soft Skull publishes—a recent rote response has been that we don't rule out any genre, it just needs to be a book that in some fashion is of-but-in-opposition-to that particular genre.
As with my generalizations generally, there's a little bit of truth in it—we just published a few weeks ago, our first ever relationships book Making Love, Playing Power: Men, Women, & the Rewards of Intimate Justice by Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio. He's an author who contacted us at the suggestion of Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist we publish (White Like Me) and has done what is in effect a political book on relationships best summed up (I hope) by the tagline on the cover...
"The reason men don't listen to women is not because men can't understand what women say [pace John Gray]. The reason men don't listen to women is because they can get away with it."
Basically, it argues that for relationships to work, we can't pretend that classism, racism, and patriarchy don't exist...
December 12, 2007
Led Zepplin
...to play New York City next year? Who knows. But it's enough to persuade me that after we do Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl in April, we should do his Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me in September. Check the interview in 3AM and the review at The Complete Review.
November 27, 2007
Oh [Im]pure and Radiant Millet
Kick ass profile on Lydia Millet (entitled "Oh Pure and Radiant Millet") by Louisa Ermelino in this week's Publishers Weekly. They've gotten much better about not hiding stuff behind the subscription barrier, which is deliciously nice.
Many choice items, I'll give ya two, one about her very first book, published by Algonquin in the mid 90's, and the other Ermelino's rather lovely description of How the Dead Dream her soon-to-be-latest.
“I started out working for a magazine called Fighting Knives, edited by a mercenary in South America, so when they offered me a slot at Hustler, I jumped to the porn side happily.” She sold her first book, Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996) during the two years at Hustler and says she learned a lot from the philosophy of the prisoners who made up a large part of the subscription base. And then there was her gun-running managing editor, a dwarf whose dominatrix visited once a month and destroyed the furniture in his office.
How the Dead Dreamis about the evolution of a young boy, T., obsessed with money—“His first idol was Andrew Jackson”—who becomes a wealthy real estate developer as an adult while ruminating on the big questions of identity, religion, death and nature. T. also experiences them: his father abandons the family to embrace his homosexuality and to work as a bartender in a transvestite bar in Key West, Fla., while his devoutly Catholic mother has a near-death experience and returns to tell T. that there's an IHOP on the other side with fluorescent lights and patrons “fat, pasty-faced, and dressed in loud prints,” not to mention that none of them were Catholics. T. takes to breaking into zoos, spending the night with the animals in their cages, finally setting out on a Conradian journey into the rain forest. The novel is pure Millet, dark, funny, brilliant, and a departure from all the others.
Oh and I can't resist a third which describes what happened when she turned in her second book:
Her editor at Algonquin was gone and his replacement called the book terrible, rude, inappropriate, filled with obscenities and without likable characters, notably the pornographer protagonist.
The second book was Everyone's Pretty, the manuscript languished unpublished for the best part of a decade, but it was that manuscript, touted to me by Josh Beckmann of Wave Books, that first turned me onto Lydia, and which we published before Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and re-issued My Happy Life.
November 26, 2007
Belated subscription, just in time for the holidays...
So I guess a 2007 subscription that is announced in late November 2007 is more a gift package than a subscription, but if we have a good showing, then I can make a strong case for why we should really do a solid subscription program in 2008. Plus there is nothing more useless than a book in my office. Or a warehouse... Soooooo, herewith, the Soft Skull It's-Been-A-Loooooooooooooong-Year 2007 Fiction Subscription, consisting of multiple goodies, but noteworthy for its national diversity: a Canadian woman, a Congolese man, a Turkish woman, an American man, a German woman, an American man, an American woman, another American woman, and a Japanese woman...
A Woman Alone At Night by Tamara Faith Berger " [H]ot...sharp, powerful."—SEE Magazine
African Psycho by Alain Mabanckou “Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation.” Time Out New York
The City In Crimson Cloak by Asli Erdogan "An exceptionally sensitive and perceptive writer who gives us perfect literary texts....”—Orhan Pamuk
Gone and Back Again by Jonathan Scott Fuqua " [D]arkly humorous…intimate…conveys pathos and heartbreak while maintaining Caley's rich voice."—Publishers Weekly
Guantanamo by Dorothea Dieckmann, translated by Tim Mohr. " Reading it can cause a sort of bone-chill to set in, and an even more discomforting sense of awe. ”—Village Voice “Excellent”—Playboy
Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe. Quill Award Finalist. LitBlog Co-op Read This! Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2007. Nuff said.
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez. The book that generated an Alice Sebold reader review on Amazon.
My Happy Life by Lydia Millet. Re-whet your Millet appetite before we publish How the Dead Dream in January…
Vibrator by Mari Akasaka, translated by Michael Emmerich. “Disturbing and original”—Esquire
And the 2006 bonus (cause there’s always a bonus with Soft Skull): H20 by Mark Swartz. "A short, sharp shock, a jab to the eyeball and brain, H2O by Mark Swartz is a more telling commentary on our society now as Don DeLillo's White Noise was in its time. Savagely precise, clever but not shallow, Swartz's writing lacerates even as it's deeply, disturbingly funny."-Jeff VanderMeer
And may be purchased here.
November 20, 2007
Subvert the business book genre...
...by voting for Typo by David Silverman, as Best Business Book of 2007. Why? Because the one thing I learned publishing this book is that nobody, and I truly mean nobody (but Soft Skull) publishes a business book about failure. I was somewhat aware it was unusual when I started the process of publishing it, but it wasn't til the book was out there, fighting the retail fight, that it became clear that this was just a real no-no-no-no. So if you want to participate in the equally perhaps quixotic endeavor of persuading 800-CEO-READS to pick Typo, click here.
September 07, 2007
The Hotel Women Gently Stalk Wayne Koestenbaum
Hotel Theory is getting some folks all hot and bothered. They're stalking him (albeit gently). They're concerned it might not be "possible to be a hotel woman in today's day and age"...Or perhaps not? "All I needed was a vodka gimlet. And a naked Liberace."
There's some other nice online stuff—nice little review in the LA Times, the tireless Richard Labonte, Brian Pera performs real sleight of hand for the Fanzine, the inestimable Joshua Glenn enjoys it for the Globe's Brainiac.
But the Venom Literati, I'll confess they've found a model of literary blogging I find awfully hot. Gently stalking an author, oh yeah...
(Incidentally, it occurs to me that a catalog, the subject of a previous post, could be considered a sort of hotel...a thought I've nowhere to put but here)
August 21, 2007
The Lit Blog Love
Jamestown week in the Lit Blog Co-op... Matt Sharpe will post there tomorrow, it will be his first ever blog post, prepare your questions and witness his blogian deflowering...
August 07, 2007
Catalogs, catalogs everywhere, and not a drop to drink...
So here are links that will reveal the future activity of Soft Skull and our Counterpoint mothership.
The Counterpoint Fall 2007 list is here (some topnotch stuff in there, from Jenny McPhee and The Littlest Hitler to Laura Flynn and Famous Writers School)—also, the catalog is without a cover, as we had to excerpt it out of the overall Perseus Basic Books catalog, so forgive the clunkiness...
The Counterpoint & Soft Skull combined Winter catalog here (and, you know, it'll take a great many blog posts to elaborate, or even summarize, so just check it out—and Soft Skull purists (!?) should know, there are books in the Counterpoint list that were once Soft Skull books, make sure to take a gander at the whole shebang—together with the Shoemaker & Hoard, we've made that list a wee bit more contrapuntal...)...
As regards the Soft Skull Fall 2007 catalog. Well, it just doesn't exist, mea culpa, there just aren't the hours in the day, so just check out the Coming Soon page...it's the de facto Fall 2007 list for Soft Skull (and boy do we have much much stuff, since there are a bunch of Spring books we had to reschedule for the Fall, especially some rather spectacular translations...Guantanamo, Vibrator, The City in Crimson Cloak...)
Lastly, there's the soon-to-be-entirely-enfolded-within-Counterpoint Shoemaker & Hoard Fall 2007 list. And when you see some of what they've going on—a new Donald Barthelme collection Flying to America, Tetsuo Miura's Shame in the Blood, and a new cultural history of rape—you'll see why we are psyched to be joining forces...
A lot, for one blog post, I know. Bookmark this sucka, please, it'll serve you well. And e-mail me for more info on anything that catches your eye, eh?
June 04, 2007
Bookforum Two-fer: Hotel Sharpe/Hotel Koestenbaum
Janine Armin on Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory
Adding to his mind-altering oeuvre, which already includes poems, a novel, and works of criticism on subjects like Andy Warhol, Jackie O, and gay men’s penchant for opera, Wayne Koestenbaum delivers a coup d’état with Hotel Theory, a palimpsest of postmodern detritus presented in two parallel texts. On the left side of the page, “Hotel Theory,” Koestenbaum’s phenomenological study of hotels, provides the mental framework for the reader to act as a Bachelardian cosmonaut in the Lana Turner and Liberace dime novel “Hotel Women” on the right. Hotel Theory showcases Koestenbaum’s inflections via innumerable analogies to literature and art, and hotel interludes with guests ranging from Oscar Wilde to Richard Strauss to Marilyn Monroe.
Ed Park on Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown
In Jamestown, the future has arrived, and we get that loop writ large: a postapocalyptic Eastern Seaboard teeming with misunderstanding, wobbly truces, Technicolor violence, and moments of grace. But it’s also loopy: In the wake of a massive, undefined “annihilation,” Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war, having recently waged the Battle of Joralemon Street. A Manhattan exploratory party, heading south in search of fuel, encounters a Virginia tribe of ambiguously ethnic Indians (one is named Sit Knee Find Gold—or is it Sidney Feingold?), who use wireless devices and appear to know English. In contrast to the ennobling austerity of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s recent foray into calamity lit, Sharpe amps up the Grand Guignol and the wisecracking, hurling the “linguistic detritus” of the early twenty-first century at us at warp speed. The story is a laudably freaked-out (and occasionally bewildering) cover version of the early-seventeenth century founding of Jamestown (England’s first sustainable colony in the New World), rendered as a narrative round-robin à la As I Lay Dying and reset in a rusted-out day after tomorrow that owes something to the variant futures of Philip K. Dick.
April 04, 2007
Petra Nemcova
Never thought a Soft Skull book would make the Fashionista blog...but if you're going to publish an epic poem based on the Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova, that's what you actually got to be hoping for.
February 17, 2007
Wole Soyinka on genocide and Darfur...and much much more...
To whet your appetite for the next issue of TRANSITION Magazine...
The Avoidance Word Still Screams its Name
Half a century ago, the more optimistic poet-militants of decolonization imagined the world's races humanely detonated, then shuffled and reassembled into a hybrid creature of the universal. On one issue at least, today's African Union, Arab League, and U.N. have indeed become one: one monstrous chimera ready and willing to let Darfur be cleansed of Africa . Wole Soyinka has some words to say about this—well actually, just one.
Change will come, of that I am sure…
If there's a bright spot in Sudan , the East would be it. Sarah Abbas talks to Dr. Amna Dirar —Eastern Front politician, tribal leader, college professor, and, oh yes, woman.
Measuring Time
By Helon Habila. An excerpt from the novel.
Searching for Zion
They come from desert Ethiopia and mid-century America , and end up in the shadows of reggae clubs, reeducation courses, and the IDF. For the darker shades of Jew, settling in a harsh Promised Land is a dramatic leap of faith. Emily Raboteau goes hunting for black folks in Israel .
Poems from Paroles pour solder la mer
By Edouard Maunick, translated by Elizabeth Wilson.
Crossroads Republic
Lester, meet Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Fela, meet Lester Bowie. Lagos, Chicago. Chicago, Lagos. Brent Hayes Edwards reconstructs the handshake summer of 1977.
Camera Obscura
Who can forget the innocence of those fin-de-siècle days? That halcyon time when Michael Moore was still a cult figure, the Taliban still had offices in Queens, and Afghan medical students still recoiled at the thought that Monica Lewinski was not the most beautiful woman in America ? From Flushing to Kandahar , Harlem to Kabul, Alan Edelstein was there—and he has the tapes to prove it.
Salamanca
In downtown Khartoum , a mom-and-pop souvenir shop provides a lazy retreat for the local cosmopolitans. But who's that German crone trawling through the merchandise with a half-naked tribesman at her side? Jamal Mahjoub recalls a strange day in the family store.
The Heimat Maneuver
After World War II, Allied horse-trading left Poland 's treasured eastern borderlands in the hands of the Soviets. As compensation, Stalin gave the Poles Silesia , an ethnically mixed region to the west that happened to be a province of Germany . Forced German expulsion and “re-Polonization” ensued, but, as Chris Bebenek discovers, even in a unified Europe ancient blood feuds die hard.
February 16, 2007
Pocahontas has a MySpace page? (And Poets & Writers has some Matt Sharpe pages)
So I see in next month's Poets & Writers, in which Mary Gannon has a great interview with/profile of Matt Sharpe, that Pocahontas has a MySpace page.
Whodathunkit...We learn her general interests are:
thinking in english, hanging out with my gal-pals, IM-ing, my wireless device, evenings in the cornfields, Johnny, my secrets. Definitely NOT violence or guns or macho men like my father (although I do love my father).
She's blogging too, this is the feed.
And here's some of what Ms. Gannon and Mr. Sharpe have to say about the book:
The speech patterns of the 1600s were something that he wanted to make reference to in Jamestown. "I wanted the book to bear the imprint or have the stain not only of contemporary speech patterns and diction, but also of Elizabethan and Jacobean speech patterns, so I turned to my favorite writer of that period, Shakespeare." The prose in Jamestown combines the rhythms of text-messaging patter with iambic meter, allusions to hip-hop culture and canonical poetry (Wallace Stevens's, in particular) strewn throughout.Language in general—its potential, limits, power, and failings—is a major concern in Sharpe's work. He sees the language barrier between the English and the Algonquians as a model for "the way in which each of us has our own private associations that inform every word that comes out of our mouths. Communication," Sharpe says, "is always an act of translation."
February 05, 2007
A Good War is Hard to Find
It's taken a little while, but folks are starting to realize how goddam brilliant this little book by David Griffith is. There's now an excerpt up at Utne, a profile in Pittsburgh City Paper, Sojourner's gets it, and Colleen Mondor is working in it.
Here's a bit of the bit that Utne picked up:
...One day I was walking down the hall at school and a kid passed me wearing the jacket. "That's my jacket," I said. "No, it's not," the kid sneered. One of the deans of the school was walking by and asked what the problem was. "Look in the sleeves," I told him, since my mother had written my name in black marker in each sleeve. Sure enough, when the dean looked, there was my name.Things were like that then. Open and shut. Yes it is. No it isn't. Everything seemed good, clean, and orderly. I learned that there was such a thing as justice-I had witnessed it.
At night, I was learning that war could be humane and just. Footage from the noses of smart bombs allowed me to see with my own eyes that American bombers weren't dumping their payloads indiscriminately over cities, like the Germans did to Britain and the Brits did to Germany and we did to the Japanese during World War II. These were "smart" bombs. This was a "smart" war in all the various connotations of "smart": intelligent; shrewd and calculating; amusingly clever; with a neat and well cared for appearance; fashionable and stylish; vigorous and brisk; causing a sharp stinging sensation.
Our history teacher didn't talk about the Gulf War. She didn't even pull down a map of the world and point to the Middle East. Then again, I suppose she had bigger problems to worry about-some kids in the class couldn't locate Illinois on a map.
Neither do I remember talking about the war with my friends, unless it was to ask whether we'd seen the latest awesome press conference footage-General Schwarzkopf standing in front of a television monitor narrating the flight of a bomb as it entered the chimney of a building or the window of a munitions depot.
I thought about the war the most when I was at band practice. That fall, the band director passed out the sheet music for Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam, Dresden, 1945), a piece by Daniel Bukvich dedicated to the firebombing and subsequent obliteration of the German city of Dresden...
A week of negativity...
...at the SOMA Review who are running a John S. Hall Daily Negation everyday this week...
January 08, 2007
As the show goes on...
...a nice review of our fella George Tabb's second volume of his memoirs Surfing Armageddon: Fishnets, Fascists, and Body Fluids in Florida (George, if you click through, is further proof there are worse things than bankruptcy) here at a very interesting British webzine PEOM (aka Positive Energy of Madness)—you'll enjoy their interview with Dave Courtney, "Celebrity Gangster."
December 18, 2006
Holiday Sale: 30% discount and free copy of Sparrow's Yes, You ARE A Revolutionary
30% discount for the holidays, plus a free copy of Sparrow's Yes, You ARE A Revolutionary for anyone who places an order between now and Dec 21st!
For the inner curmudgeon Burn Christmas Burn
For the haiku lover Did I Wake You?
For the ranter What Would Bill Hicks Say?
For the gamer Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
For the child (inner or otherwise) The Saddest Little Robot
For the GLBTQ in your life (or for the 70's prom photos...): Kings and Queens: Queers at the Prom
Cause there was a New Orleans before Katrina, and there will be one after The Neighborhood Story Project
You wanna make a movie in 2007? Putting the Pieces Together: The Graffiti Model for Indie Filmmaking
Plus the subscriptions are still the best deal out there! No discounts there unfortunately, cause it's already such a kick-ass deal, but we'll still give you Sparrow's Yes, You ARE A Revolutionary
November 30, 2006
Of Brooklyn, by Brooklyn, from Brooklyn, for the World—Patchwork Planet, by Kate Milford and Jonathan Lethem
Some of you may be aware of the excitement generated when Jonathan Lethem mentioned to Mark Sarvas that he'd be writing the endnotes to the Library of America's edition of four Philip K. Dick novels. I therefore thought it worth mentioning that Jonathan himself is making another contribution to the book world at the moment, viz Patchwork Planet, a book of photographs by Kate Milford, of downtown Brooklyn, accompanied by texts by Jonathan, published by ourselves, and available exclusively through Bookcourt Brooklyn. So, buy it here, and here only...
All the details on the book itself after the jump, but Bookcourt will also be hosting a party for this fun project on December 7th at 8:00pm at their store on 163 Court Street in Cobble Hill to which all are invited!
November 21, 2006
TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: He creates fusion in his Oakland Township home
The regular reader of the Soft Skull News Blog will have noted how I manage to connect just about any ole event in the world to a Soft Skull book...Here's a particularly fine example of that pathology, courtesy of Nick Mamatas...
The real world: TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: He creates fusion in his Oakland Township home
The Soft Skull world: Under My Roof—A wild fantasia wherein a 12-year-old telepath creates a nuclear device and overthrows the US government.
Isabel Allende {hearts} American Genius
Whodathunkit. On the Lenny Lopate Show, last Thursday, Isabel Allende was asked
What's the last great book you read?
Allende: Lynne Tillman, American Genius
The Shadow of the Wind by Ruiz Safon
October 19, 2006
Putting the Pieces Together of the Quality of Life
So we've this rather fun new book about to come out and some of you might have even inadvertently come upon a reference to it in last Sunday's New York Times piece on graffiti movies, called Graffiti Cinema Turns Moody" The book—Putting the Pieces Together—is a behind-the-scenes/screenplay tie-in to the film Quality of Life (now out on DVD, though still having theatrical screenings here and htere), and it also has a big section on DIY movie-making.
The punchline of all this though is that they've a great video podcast. Click here to watch the first installment, and here to add the RSS feed and this is a little bit of what Ben, the director, has to say about this vodcast:
Making Quality of Life was sheer hell. Our lead actor dropped out. We lost our jobs. Personalities clashed. We were always worried about the cops shutting us down. We never had the money to do anything we wanted to do. Every fricking step was a struggle.But we adopted The Graffiti Model to get the shite done. And in the
process, proved that money doesn't mean anything, and passion means
everything.This vodcast series will pull back the curtain and tell the
compelling, behind-the-scenes story of how we made (and distributed)
this film with no money, against all odds.As you know, we have no ad budget to speak of, so we live or die on
guerilla marketing and word-of-mouth. Every person you share this with
is another link to proving you don't need money to be heard. It's all
about you, the grassroots.
Stop Smiling magazine
The magazine that bills itself as "the magazine for high-minded low-lifes" has two great reviews—fascinating for us here at least—of Mark Ames's Going Postal and Claro's Electric Flesh as translated by Brian Evenson, the latter review a two-hander that also looks at Shelley Jackson's Half Life.
September 25, 2006
Bill Burroughs, Jr.
So we've a book coming out in November called Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of Williams S. Burroughs, Jr., the memoir of the "Son of Naked Lunch." But, because this book has been so long in the publishing (long story to tell, I'll spare you...), some folks are already writing and talking about it...this from today's International Herald Tribune and then, next week, you can do an online chat about Billy Burroughs with writer David Ohle, who compiled and edited Cursed from Birth and who is also the author of the Soft Skull book The Age of Sinatra...
September 10, 2006
Who is The Whistleblower?
A study of 233 whistleblowers—the largest study on this topic ever conducted—found that the average whistleblower was a family man in his 40s with a strong conscience and high moral values. After blowing the whistle on fraud, 90 percent of the whistleblowers were fired or demoted, 27 percent faced lawsuits, 26 percent had to seek psychiatric or physical care, 25 percent suffered alcohol abuse, 17 percent lost their homes, 15 percent got divorced, 10 percent attempted suicide, and 8 percent were bankrupted. But in spite of all this, only 16 percent said that they would not blow the whistle again. The Whistleblower is the story of one such person, who gambled everything by telling the truth.
August 14, 2006
Powells.com on Delia Falconer
A truly beautiful review of Delia Falconer's The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, from Powells.com
As I read The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, I was struck by the notion of how much work must have gone into each sentence. There isn't a wasted moment anywhere, and I imagine there are legions of writers who would give their right arm to be able to express in a page what Falconer manages to do in a single phrase or turn of expression. Early in the book, she writes: "His mind also wanders. His life a set of dark rooms which he moves through. Some things he remembers, others he seems to have imagined." The economy of Falconer's prose is breathtaking, introducing us succinctly to the subjective memory of our protagonist. Stripped of superfluous flourish, yet vigorously evocative, Falconer delivers motifs and messages with tactical precision. Near the end of the book, Falconer writes:He wanted to write the lost thoughts of soldiers.
Not the grand heavy story, he has never known his life that way, but the seams and spaces in between. This is history too, he thinks, the weight of gathered thoughts, the cumulus of idle moments.
In the real world, Custer went out in what was perceived as a blaze of glory, while Benteen faded away, slowly destroying his career and his health through chronic alcoholism. In The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, he manages to rescue not only his humanity, but the memories of his fallen comrades from the dustbin of history, something best accomplished in fiction.
Should this, or anythign motivate you to click through to the Soft Skull buy page, click on the buy from Powell's button, to show them some love
June 15, 2006
Back, and with a new subscription!
Hi folks:
Apologies for the long absence and, in atonement, herewith TWO new subscriptions for all y'all. (I also know it is about time for some more pontificating and I promise a major screed on the subject of permissions and anthologies within the next few weeks.)
As you might imagine, after poetry and fiction it starts to get a little complicated figuring out how to allocate and compartmentalize. But, for this year at least, herewith two new more categories:
Pop Culture and Religion & Politics.
Here's the mix in Popular Culture:
Daily Negations by John S. Hall (yes, he of King Missile and "Detatchable Penis" and "Jesus Was Way Cool")
Putting the Pieces Together: The Graffiti Model for Indie Filmmaking by Benjamin Morgan and the Quality of Life Crew The book about the movie I plugged on the blog recently!
Surfing Armageddon: Fishnets, Fascists, and Body Fluids in Florida Called "the David Sedaris of Punk," by Resonance Magazine, George Tabb picks up where his last acclaimed memoir left off, crafting a humor and pathos filled teenage tale of growing up, losing one's virginity and overcoming abuse.
Did I Wake You? Crazy Haiku Chick by Beth Lapides with, believe it or not, the first ever blurb for a Soft Skull book from Greg Behrendt (author of “He’s Just Not That Into You”)
"Beth Lapides rocks
She is so very hai-cool
Read This Book Today!
It's like your funniest punk rock girlfriend decided to write haiku!"
What Would Bill Hicks Say? Famous writers, humorists, musicians and cartoonists comment on America by channeling their observations through the lens of seminal comic Bill Hicks.
Bound by Law—Tales from the Public Domain: By Day a Filmmaker, By Night She Fought for Fair Use!
by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins A manifesto and a teaching tool...about the attack of corporate copyright-holders on creative artists (film-makers, musicians, designers)...in the form of a comic book!
A $79 value for $50, inclusive of shipping!
And to our second new subscription...Readers of the blog will recall my discussion of Soft Skull's dive into religion publishing so I won't recapitulate here except to tell you about the titles in question.
Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Series and the Tim LaHaye Empire by Michael Standaert. An investigation and critique of the LEFT BEHIND series of best-selling novels as well as a critique of the political empire of Christian right evangelist-activist Tim LaHaye, and the surrounding culture.
Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Bishop Gene Robinson by Elizabeth Adams. An exploration of the man—Gene Robinson, the world's first openly gay Episcopal bishop—who many believe will be the catalyst for the breaking apart of the Episcopal Church.
Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes edited by Laurel Snyder. By turns tragic and funny, religious and heartbreaking, angry and surprisingly familiar, Half/Life represents the altog