Indie Book Buzz: Hawthorne Books

It's the return of the Indie Book Buzz here at TNBBC. Over the next few months or so, we will be inviting members of the small press publishing houses to share which of their upcoming releases they are most excited about!

This week's picks comes from Liz Crain, 

editor and publicity director at Hawthorne Books

I LOVED YOU MORE, Tom Spanbauer

(Released April 1, 2014) 

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Tom Spanbauer’s first novel in seven years is a rich and expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak covering twenty-five years.  At the heart of the book is a love triangle: two men, one woman, all of them writers.  The first chapters are set in the mid–eighties in New York City.  At Columbia, Ben forms a bond with his macho friend, Hank.  Their bond is deep and ostensibly formed around their love of writing.  But they soon find out their love is more than literary.  As C.S Lewis says, friendship is homosexual.  Hank is straight, though, on the Kinsey scale a zero, which means no men.  Ben is a five, which means an occasional woman.  But both are artists, and this affection between them is a force. How do you measure love?

Set against a world of writers and artists, New York’s Lower East Side in the wild eighties, the drab confining Idaho of Ben’s youth, Portland in his middle age, and the many places in between, the complex world disclosed in I Loved You More, written in the poisoned, lyrical voice of Ben, is the author’s most complex and wise novel to date.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT: If you have a heart and are human there are miles and miles of emotional terrain for you to travel and connect with in this passionate, searching novel about intimate relationships and the complicated lives of writers set primarily in New York City in the eighties and Portland in the late nineties. I don’t know how much polyamory is a part of the fabric of modern relationship culture in other cities but here in Portland, Oregon – where Hawthorne Books is based and a good deal of Tom Spanbauer’s novel is set – polyamory, as well as other less traditional and less socially acceptable ways of navigating and understanding intimate relationships be they gay, straight or anything in-between is strong and has been gaining ground in recent years. Spanbauer’s I Loved You More moves about some of these less socially acceptable and less-easy-to-define sorts of relationships and sets its course on a long and winding years-spanning road of a non-traditional love triangle between two men and one women. I Loved You More is for anyone with a heart -- particularly those who have or want big, big love in all its messy, heartbreaking, beautiful glory.

THE END OF EVE, Ariel Gore

(Released March 2014) 

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: At age 39, Ariel Gore has everything she's always wanted: a successful writing career, a long-term partnership, a beautiful if tiny home, a daughter in college and a son in preschool. But life's happy endings don't always last. If it's not one thing, after all, it's your mother.
Knock knock.
Her name is Eve. Her epic temper tantrums have already gotten her banned from three cab companies in Portland. And she's here to announce that she's dying. "Pitifully, Ariel," she sighs. "You're all I have." Ariel doesn't want to take care of her crazy dying mother, but she knows she will. 

Darkly humorous and intimately human,The End of Eve reads like Terms of Endearment meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Amidst the chaos of clowns and hospice workers, pie and too much whiskey, Ariel’s own 10-year relationship begins to unravel, forcing her to reconsider the meaning of family and everything she’s ever been taught to call “love.”

WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT: I’ve been a fan of Ariel Gore’s ever since she started the smart, alternative, zine-like Hip Mama Magazine in the early nineties. Since then Gore has gone on to write several nonfiction books including Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness and Atlas of the Human Heart: A Memoir. The End of Eve is one of Gore’s most dig deep and personal books and I know I’m not alone in wanting to get as close to Gore as humanly possible. When she was in Portland recently – where Hawthorne Books is based – for The End of Eve book launch all of us at Hawthorne were struck yet again by the black humor of the memoir. It taps into that old adage – if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. Well, you’ll cry a little bit too I’m guessing while reading The End of Eve but let’s just say that there’s a whole lot of funny in all that death and dying too. It’s ok, laugh. We want you to. It’s good for you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Liz Crain is editor and publicity director at Hawthorne Books where she’s worked since 2009. She is also a fiction writer as well as the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Portland which has a second edition coming out from Hawthorne this September 2014 as well as Toro Bravo: Stories. Recipes. No Bull published by McSweeney's in 2013. A longtime writer on Pacific Northwest food and drink, her writing has appeared in Cooking Light, Budget Travel, VIA Magazine, The Sun Magazine, The Progressive, The Guardian and The Oregonian. Crain is also as well as co-organizer of the annual Portland Fermentation Festival.

The Indie Spotlight: Kate Vane

In today's spotlight, author Kate Vane discusses a couple of topics that I sometimes find myself mentally chewing on... where writers find the inspiration for their story ideas, and what sort of day jobs they hold.

And I bet you'd be surprised how often the day job, or something tied to it or through it, turns out to be the thing that influences the writing.

Kate shares with us her time at the local cemetery and how her experiences there shaped her latest title, Not the End:

How working with death helped me write about life

Most of us don’t think too much about what other people do all day. While our jobs are complex and involved and full of surprising skills and esoteric knowledge, we tend to assume other people’s are straightforward.

When I started working in a local authority cemeteries department, I didn’t really know what to expect. But I found it a fascinating world, incorporating history, law, horticulture – you could say, all of life.

We had burial records dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. These give invaluable insights into both family and social history. On one occasion we were contacted by a man whose sister was stillborn decades earlier. We were able to locate the grave for him. He told us this helped him face up to a loss he had never discussed with anyone, even his parents.

In the UK, the right of burial in a grave (though not the land itself) is an asset with a legal owner. This can make for some difficult situations. What if a man’s last wish was to be buried with his late wife, but her son from a previous marriage owns the right of burial and is refusing permission?

Cemeteries are beautiful outdoor spaces, full of mature trees, hedges, nesting birds – and grass. Grass-cutting can lead to endless controversy. Should we give precedence to neatness or nature? One person’s tranquil wildlife meadow is someone else’s unsightly mass of weeds.

At the heart of all these issues is how we deal with death. We focus on the details because we can’t face the loss. Although, as with any job, I mostly dealt with the task at hand, I couldn’t help but be affected by the work.

This was particularly the case when someone died without friends and family and the local authority had to take charge of the funeral arrangements. In many cases they weren’t poor, or a loner. They had just outlived everyone who was close to them.

Often all that we had was their possessions and a few basic facts, like their date of birth or marriage. It’s human nature to try and impose a narrative on these few scraps, to form a picture of who that person was. This led to the idea behind my latest novel, Not the End.

In Not the End, a woman drowns after swimming in the sea off the coast of a Devon seaside town. Three people who never met her have their lives changed by her death. Little is known about her, so they each tell themselves a story, which in turn influences how they behave in their own lives. They are the woman who finds the body, the cemetery manager who plans her funeral and the probate researcher (‘heir hunter’) who looks for her heirs.

There was a fourth main character, a psychiatric nurse. She survived for an entire first draft, but I felt that she wasn’t working. Her story was about the challenges people face in the caring professions. But I felt I’d covered that before, not least in my first novel, Recognition, which is about a therapist working with the family of a murder victim.

So I rewrote the novel without her. It was hard work but I didn’t feel my time had been wasted. She had shaped aspects of the story. Other characters took on some of her insights and her role in the plot.

In a book which partly deals with themes of absence and things that are ‘not’, it seems appropriate that Not the End is haunted by a character who isn’t there.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kate Vane lives in Devon in the UK. She is the author of two novels.

Not the End is a novel about art, life and cemetery management, set against the backdrop of a summer heatwave in a Devon seaside town. Recognitionis a psychological crime novel set in Leeds.

Where Writers Write: JS Breukelaar

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is JS Breukelaar. JS lives in Sydney by way of San Diego. She has work published in Prick of the Spindle, Juked, Opium and Fantasy Magazine, among numerous others, and included in the anthology, Women Writing the Weird. Her collection Ink came out in 2012, and her first novel, American Monster, is out now from Lazy Fascist Press.

Where JS Breukelaar Writes

So this currently is my office. I know how lucky I am to have one. A room with an actual door you can open and close. These are IKEA bookshelves I got for my last birthday and I’ve almost unpacked all my books. I’m lucky the dining table that I use for a desk is so huge because I mark papers on it, write on it, run the household from it. I play some piano but we don’t have one now, so I commandeered this keyboard which allegedly found its way into our home from my son’s high school. I’m a Patti Smith nut, so my daughter bought me Banga and I use it as a music stand.

Before I took over this room we tried to use it as a dining room (it didn’t really work, kind of a Mad Hatters Tea Party feel to it) and before that it was one of the rooms in the flophouse that this place used to be. We got it cheap and have converted most of it into a family home. This room, not so much. It was probably the original kitchen in the house, which was the first one on the street back in 1860. It’s so small that the only way we are ever going to get the huge oak dining table and sideboard out is to knock out a wall. It is a very strange space to work. It has seen a lot of history. We met the little dude who lived in this room. He cooked on a battery stove and grew chick peas in pails.

The room doesn’t have any windows unless you count the old kitchen window that once probably overlooked a vegetable garden and which now looks into a bathroom the slumlord added on later. We nailed this bulletin board over the window so I don’t have to watch people on the toilet and I have my headphones so I don’t have to listen to them. The window thing was very important to me until I moved my office in here. But now I have maps instead. Lots and lots of maps. The walls are so old and damp that the maps periodically fall crashing to the floor. Ominous, right?

Above my desk are some black and white postcards which an editor mailed to me as consolation for a rejection. It was also my first submitted short story, so to have someone go to that kind of trouble, to send me those postcards, meant that I was in good company, that these were my people and I better get some stuff out there, so I did. I also have about a hundred pictures of my kids and lots of art and photography by friends and family, including this print of a photograph by my great friend, agent and mentor, Matt Bialer, whose New York pictures wowed me and still do. There is also a Lion Man coaster which my son made in honour of the title of my first published story.

Along with several pieces of oppressive furniture I share this tiny space with Don Quijote, Neil Young, my cat Starvin Marvin who rules from on top of the freezer—I mentioned the freezer, right? And also my Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Eric, who sits at my feet. 

On the wall above the sideboard are two 1950s-era posters I found in my grandfather’s attic in New York. The one on the left is called USA At a Glance, the Authentic Presidential Chart and it stops at Eisenhower. The one on the right is called Five Hundred Years of English Prose, and it’s very cool, much as my grandfather was. He taught me to read, I mean to really read, got me hooked, and I worshipped him in the way of an addict to the pusher man.

I always kind of muster the books I’m going to need for a course I’m teaching, or an article I have to write, separate them out from the pack, kind of let them know what they’re in for. So these books on the sideboard are for an upcoming Science Fiction course. Propping them up is an empty bottle of American Monster Edition Moet Chandon, courtesy of my husband.  

Sometimes it’s all too much, I feel weighed down by the unknowable history in the room, the complexity of it all, the maps to no where. Not to the mention the wheezing farting animals and the running toilet, and I have to throw my laptop under my arm and go write in a coffee shop. Where there are real windows. One of my favourites is a local joint we call Scrambled Lesbians, because it’s run by lesbians who do an all-day breakfast—it’s actually called Scrambled—and who pull the badassest expresso and that’s it. No cakes or muffins or artisan banana bread. Fresh juice pressed from slightly limp-looking produce. Woe betide should you be on the phone while placing your order or paying the check. Kind of like an alternative and much more joyous Soup Nazi. And they play an incredible mix at just the right volume to help you focus on the one thing, that one story or chapter or article, as if its the only one. Because it is. 

Book Giveaway: Romance for Delinquents

Since July 2010, TNBBC has been bringing authors and readers together every month to get behind the book! This unique experience wouldn't be possible without the generous donations of the authors and publishers involved.

It's the first of the month and you know what that means.

It's time to bring you May's Author/Reader Discussion book!

We will be reading and discussing Romance for Delinquents 

with author Michael Wayne Hampton

Michael and his publisher Foxhead Books are giving us 10 print copies 

to giveaway to US residents. 

Here's the goodreads description to whet your appetite:

In stories that bring to mind Breece D'J Pancake and Harry Crews, but in a voice all their own, Michael Wayne Hampton's characters fight the hard fight—often facing a life and landscape as stubborn and unforgiving as a rusted engine bolt. Told in voices that are remarkable for their authenticity, Hampton's people are memorable, his prose is lapidary in its precision, and his stories are hard to forget. 
-Rob Roberge, author of The Cost of Living

"Michael Wayne Hampton is a born storyteller. And that doesn't just mean he can spin a good yarn, the kind that keeps you ear-stuck and tongue-tied, listening hard. He also has the storyteller's art of absolute authenticity, fidelity to hard-knocked voices - while writing prose that lifts and transcends, that fiercely proclaims that through the ugly, all of us are living some kind of beautiful.”
-Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies 

"These are bold, insistent stories of people dancing along the edges of epiphany and oblivion. Hampton’s America is ragged, dangerous, and utterly engaging." 
-Ian Stansel, author of Everybody’s Irish

This giveaway will run through April 8th. 

Winners will be announced here and via email on April 9th.

Here's how to enter:

1 - Leave a comment here or in the giveaway thread over at TNBBC on goodreads, stating why you'd like to receive a copy of the book. You MUST be a resident of the US to win.

ONLY COMMENT ONCE. MULTIPLE COMMENTS DO NOT GAIN YOU ADDITIONAL CHANCES TO WIN.

2 - State that you agree to participate in the group read book discussion that will run from May 18th through May 24th. Michael Wayne Hampton has agreed to participate in the discussion and will be available to answer any questions you may have for him. 

 *If you are chosen as a winner, by accepting the copy you are agreeing to read the book and join the group discussion at TNBBC on Goodreads (the thread for the discussion will be emailed to you before the discussion begins). 

 3 - Your comment must have a way to contact you (email is preferred). 

GOOD LUCK!!

The Audio Series: Cris Mazza

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, we kick off the Cris Mazza "Something Wrong With Her" Blog Tour with a special audio clip of Cris reading an excerpt from her memoir. 


Cris is the author of a dozen books of fiction, mostly recently Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press 2007). Her other titles include the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and the PEN Nelson Algren Award winning How to Leave a Country. She also has a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Mazza has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary awards. A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County. Currently she lives 50 miles west of Chicago. She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Click on the soundcloud link to hear Something Wrong With Her, as read by the author:







The word on Something Wrong With Her:

Something Wrong With Her is a groundbreaking “real-time” memoir by author Cris Mazza that begins with Mazza’s anorgasmia – the inability to have an orgasm. Research suggests that at least 75% of women cannot reach orgasms through vaginal intercourse, and upwards of 15% are completely anorgasmic. The surplus of contemporary sexual memoirs would have us believe otherwise. But Something Wrong With Her is not a book about overcoming anorgasmia. Rather, it is a poignant memoir about a girl who didn’t feel the sexual awakenings she knew she was supposed to feel, and about the boy who loved her nonetheless. Thirty years later Cris Mazza went back to find that boy, now a man, only to discover that he’d never stopped yearning for her. Worse, in an attempt to numb his feelings for her, he’d sealed himself into an abusive marriage. Something Wrong With Her is an astonishing real-time testimony of a couple’s reconnection while — and within — the writing of this memoir, and their candid wrestling with 30-year-old memories, questions and regrets.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are also giving away one signed copy of the book

to a lucky US resident!

All you have to do is comment on this post to enter to win, 

(be sure to include an email address so I can contact!) 

Winner will be chosen randomly on April 4th.

Best of luck to everyone!

Melanie Reviews: Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)

Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (On A Postcard)

by Michael Kimball

from Mud Luscious Press, 2013

186 pages

Guest review by Melanie Page

Michael Kimball’s fiction has never failed to break my heart. Never. I go in feeling like I know what sadness is and come out feeling like I’ve never understood humans--that’s how much Kimball has to teach. But his postcard project is non-fiction. The postcard project started when Kimball was waiting his turn to read at a performance festival and his friend encouraged him to write the life stories of strangers just small enough to fit on postcards. There are none too young nor old to be interviewed, nor is the life story of any person too “normal” or “uneventful.”

Michael Kimball is a Facebook friend of mine. We’ve never met in person, nor do I remember how we became Facebook friends. I do remember, though, seeing his blog post updates of the postcard life stories and being jealous that a cool writer had taken time out of his day to explore strangers’ lives. What made them so special? I joked in the comments that I wanted my life story on a postcard, and Kimball agreed. I declined, thinking I wasn’t postcard material. This collection teaches me I was wrong: “I wrote one for anybody who wanted one,” Kimball explains. “I didn’t want anybody to feel their life story wasn’t interesting enough.”

In his introduction to the postcard project, Kimball explains that he grew as a person because he came into contact with so many who admitted personal thoughts and experiences that they’d never told anyone. People discuss adoption, love, addiction, homelessness, coming out, and religion. All of the postcards collected here (there were over 300, but not everyone wanted them shared) feel vitally important, and Kimball notes the responsibility of being the one releasing these stories and writing them correctly (stories are gathered interview-style first and then condensed). Not every story is decades of turbulence, but many feel internally feel chaotic despite what they label “good childhoods.”

This book was so hard to put down. I’d only heard of 2-3 people about whom Kimball wrote (including himself), but because an entire lifetime is condensed to postcard size (a practice Kimball feels helped his fiction writing, especially when he could skip 10 years in one sentence), it was like watching tiny movies. The “treat” at the end of each postcard was the update. These are completely unpredictable because they aren’t fabricated. One postcard might claim that the individual met the love of his life who changed him forever and he can’t imagine living without her only to reveal in the update they’ve parted ways. Or had a child. Some who have had highly traumatic experiences are updated as positive, content individuals while others have since passed away as a result of suicide or illness. A huge responsibility, indeed.

Melanie Page is a MFA graduate, adjunct instructor, and recent founder of Grab the Lapels, a site that only reviews books written by women (www.grabthelapels.weebly.com).

Where Writers Write: Gregory Robinson

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Gregory Robinson. 

Gregory is a writer from Boulder City, Nevada. His book, All Movies Love the Moon, is a hybrid collection of prose poems and art about silent movies. Taken as a whole, it is both a history of silent movies and an experiment in ekphrasis. 

He is also the Chair of the Humanities Department at Nevada State College in Henderson. When he is not writing or hanging around NSC, he is hiking around the desert his wife Joan, walking his dog BinBin, or (of course) watching movies.

Where Gregory Robinson Writes

I write in bed, usually under the covers. I mean, not totally under the covers, but at least up to the waist, my back propped up on pillows. This is not limited to creative work either. If I am able to stay home and work, I do that in bed as well. I have typed up all kinds of policies and course proposals from bed and I often wonder if people recognize my habit, even unconsciously. In my mind, someone is reading my edits to the academic grievance policy and saying aloud: “There is something calming about this policy, a kind of quiet reassurance that everything will be okay. I no longer feel the need to grieve.”

Proust wrote in bed. Truman Capote did as well, and famously stated that he could not think unless he was lying down. Robert McCrum argues in The Guardian that writing in bed provides a creative gateway, where “[p]art of you is still in the shadowy cave of dream world; part of you is adjusting to the sharp brightness of reality. The mixture is fruitful and often suggestive” (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/apr/28/writing-in-bed-robert-mccrum)

I could come up with all kinds of other philosophical justifications, but the truth is fairly bland: I live in a small house and I do not have much room for a formal writing space. The bed has to take on the responsibility of being where I sleep, write, and work.

There are a few important elements nearby. The first is a painting by my father, just to the left of the bed. He retired from a career in banking and began to paint vehemently, producing a garage full of works in the span of a year or so. The man contains multitudes.

The second item, just out of view in the bed in the first image, is a painting of Mary Magdalene on tin. I am not particularly religious, but I love Mary’s expression, and I am particularly enamored by how nonchalantly she carries a tiny skull in her left arm.

  

The final item is also out of view to the left side of the bed. It is a painting by Gina Quaranto, one of my favorite Las Vegasartists. It is a quadriptych with a door as the focal point of the third panel and a command: Open Door.  There is something sort of Carrollian about it. Even though there may not be a clear narrative, I am always coming up with stories that connect the four images.

I suppose I ought to mention the bookshelf as well. If you look carefully you will see a decent collection of Rose Metal Press books, alongside the others that I like to keep close. I used to be a librarian, so keeping books nearby provides some comfort, in the way that family heirlooms might do for others. I look at them sometimes from bed, as I am about to write or doze off.

Jonas T Bengtsson's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist. 

Today, Jonas T Bengtsson celebrates the release of his newest book, A Fairy Tale, with this bookishly boozey blog post of The Red Fairy....

Red Fairy

I usually go to Prague two or three times a year: to relax, to take long walks, to look at the beautiful gothic architecture, to get lost and feel a little bit like Kafka and blame my confusion on the narrow crooked streets which intersect at weird angles that always throw my poor sense of direction.

But I also love Prague for its amazing bars. Where you can get drunk on Czech pilsnerfor a few euros, or go high life, and drink cucumber sake cocktails in the local Buddha Bar?

And since my generation of hipster douchy writers and artists favor Berlin, it hasn’t been spoiled yet.

I was in Prague a couple of weeks ago, with my girlfriend who is also a writer. She was about to have her second book published, so the plan was to help her relax: walk around, and get drunk - the basic preparations for a good book launch. We arrived late Monday evening. Our driver from the airport told us he had gotten the lead guitarist from the German rock band Scorpions to stop smoking. They had been best friends for years.

We had a late dinner, and afterwards we thought we’d go for a night cap.

We found a bar close to our hotel. From the outside it looked shut down. I grabbed the door handle; it opened. The lights were dimmed, the walls were painted red.  There was a nice smell of weed in the air, a good sign that this was a place you could light a cigarette without getting arrested.

We sat at the bar, we talked with a young Slovak who worked as a waiter at a medieval themed restaurant. He spent all day strapped with a sword and yelling at customers. He loved it.

After a few beers the bartender leaned over the bar.

“You wanna get fucked up?” he asked me. Since giving up recreational drugs when I became a father, I was definitely interested in what he had to offer.

He pulled down a bottle of green spirit from the shelf: the local absinthe, almost fluorescent, very high proof and with a lot of wormwood. He put a single ice cube in a tall drinking glass, pouring one third of absinth in the glass and topping it off with the local Redbull clone called Semtex. He threw in a maraschino cherry - tada!

I had a few of those. I felt pretty great. Maybe a bit disappointed that it didn’t quite have the promised effect on me.

My girlfriend advised me to at least wait until the next morning to get my forehead tattooed.

When recently asked to come up with a cocktail that embodies one of the characters in my latest novel, I thought of this bar, this night, and the drink the bartender had called “the red fairy.”

The mix of old world absinthe and something as artificial as generic redbull might serve as a nice analogy for the father in my novel. A man caught between two worlds, the old and the new. An anarchist who wouldn’t subscribe to that label, because he hates ‘isms. A man fleeing from Christianity who believes in angels.

Mix that with the brutality of modern life, caffeinated and artificially sweet, and something bad just might happen. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jonas T. Bengtsson has published two previous novels: his 2005 literary debut, Amina’s Letters, winner of the Danish Debutant Award and BG Bank First Book Award; and Submarino, the film adaptation of which took the 2010 Nordic Council Film Prize. He has also received the P.O. Enquist Literary Prize and was nominated for the Weekendavisens Literature Prize. He lives in Copenhagen.

The Audio Series: Bob Waldner

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, Bob Waldner reads an excerpt from his book Peripheral Involvement. Bob was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey, before heading off to Duke Universityto study mechanical engineering.  After spending two years working as an engineer in Maryland, he changed course and enrolled in the University of Michigan Law School.  For the past fourteen years, he has represented banks and hedge funds as a transactional attorney in private practice in New York.  He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Erinn, and his two daughters, Maureen and Madeleine.  Peripheral Involvement is his first novel.

Click on the soundcloud bar to experience an excerpt of Peripheral Involvement, as read by the author:





The word on Peripheral Involvement:

Jack Caufield never imagined that he would wake up one day and find a dead woman in his bed. That sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen to guys like him. He was on his way to law school, but instead of fielding Socratic questions from law professors, he finds himself facing the third degree from a bunch of angry cops. Despite their efforts, they find nothing incriminating, and Jack is allowed to get on with his education and his life. 

Over the next fifteen years, he becomes a modestly successful corporate lawyer, a well-paid but insignificant cog in the Wall Street machine. He's resigned to playing a disappointing role in the system that he has come to disdain, until he learns that his encounter with that unlucky girl may not have been coincidental. Confronted with the possibility that the men who run the prestigious financial institution that he now represents may have been involved in a shocking conspiracy, his search for the truth is complicated by the knowledge that discovering it could cost him the success that he's spent his life chasing. *lifted with love from goodreads

Hold My Blog Hostage

In the interest of bringing you fresh content as often as possible, we get a kick out of creating new and interesting features to call attention to small press authors and their books.

This time I think I might've taken things too far!?!

My latest series centers around the idea of authors kidnapping my blog for a week. A full-out, uncensored, 5 day long hostile takeover. Authors can use TNBBC to write guest posts on whatever topics float their boat, contribute to our current features, write reviews about their favorite novels... the wilder, the crazier, the better. We're talkin' complete control, captive audience, the whole kit-n-kaboodle!

But in order to kick things off, we need kidnappers. Shoot me an email at mescorn@ptd.net. Tell me your deepest, darkest desires for the blog... then ball gag me and throw me in the trunk of your car while you jump in the drivers seat and take TNBBC by the wheel.

I promise I won't make too much noise.

The Indie Ink Runs Deep: Sue Lange

Every now and then I manage to talk a small press author into showing us a little skin... tattooed skin, that is. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. Whether it's the influence for their book, influenced by their book, or completely unrelated to the book, we get to hear the story behind their indie ink....


Today's ink story comes from Sue Lange, and it's our very first VIDEO tattoo post! The big revel is at the end, it's a real riot!

Sue has two published work of speculative fiction satire. Her first novel, Tritcheon Hash, was republished as an ebook by Book View Cafe in 2011, and was included in Kirkus’ best of list for that year. Her second novel, We, Robots, was included in io9′s 13 Stories that will change the way you look at Robots list. Her short fiction has been published in Futures (Nature), Adbusters, Apex Digest of Science Fiction and Horror, and elsewhere. She lives in Pennsylvania with a dog, two cats, and a refrigerator.