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MOTEL: AN ANTHOLOGY
edited by Barbara Byar
$16.99
ISBN: 979-8880499212
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On lost, lonely highways, deep in the American heartlands and skirting the shady edges of cities, once ubiquitous motels have faded, some into ruin, others transformed from way station to permanent residence. MOTEL captures the heartbreak, desperation and indeed magic of motels.
Think Paris, Texas. Fool for Love. Wild at Heart. Even Bonnie and Clyde. This anthology is full of stories that pay homage to the essence of motels in all their beauty and pathos. Characters and stories of grit and glory, the brutal and banal. As motels fade from popularity and even existence, this volume attempts to capture them before they’re gone altogether...and all their stories with them. Of the twenty-eight stories in MOTEL, there’s no two stories that are similar. Like a motel, these stories are neighboring rooms. None in them are the same, but here they are, together.
edited by Barbara Byar
$16.99
ISBN: 979-8880499212
Order Here!
On lost, lonely highways, deep in the American heartlands and skirting the shady edges of cities, once ubiquitous motels have faded, some into ruin, others transformed from way station to permanent residence. MOTEL captures the heartbreak, desperation and indeed magic of motels.
Think Paris, Texas. Fool for Love. Wild at Heart. Even Bonnie and Clyde. This anthology is full of stories that pay homage to the essence of motels in all their beauty and pathos. Characters and stories of grit and glory, the brutal and banal. As motels fade from popularity and even existence, this volume attempts to capture them before they’re gone altogether...and all their stories with them. Of the twenty-eight stories in MOTEL, there’s no two stories that are similar. Like a motel, these stories are neighboring rooms. None in them are the same, but here they are, together.
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Design by Adam Van Winkle
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MOTEL virtual book launch: March 30, 2024. |
HOW TO ROB A CONVENIENCE STORE
by Rachel R. Baum
$9.99
ISBN
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Since living in both Texas and Montana, Rachel R. Baum has been appalled and fascinated by this country’s pervasive gun culture. Here she write poems about guns to try and make some sense where there is none.
“Subways, Fourth of July parades, synagogues, malls, schools—no place is safe. The stunning poems of Rachel R. Baum take us back to these familiar human landscapes now painted with the gun violence that has become part of daily life in America. Her poems show us the price we pay for the gun that has permeated American culture, the gun that is glorified by some, wreaks havoc for others, and of course kills and maims. She recognizes the “ghosts left lingering” for so many who have been affected by a gun, and our collective need to “look up to search the sky for a glimpse of sunlight,” and still, these poems do not look away. They consider the perspective of the victims, perpetrators, and especially those left behind to pick up their lives in the aftermath, those with no other choice but to go on in a world with “the thunder of guns in the distance.” These are important, bold and haunting poems. Read them and be changed.” –Tara Bray, author of Mistaken for Song (Persea, 2009), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize
by Rachel R. Baum
$9.99
ISBN
Order Here!
Since living in both Texas and Montana, Rachel R. Baum has been appalled and fascinated by this country’s pervasive gun culture. Here she write poems about guns to try and make some sense where there is none.
“Subways, Fourth of July parades, synagogues, malls, schools—no place is safe. The stunning poems of Rachel R. Baum take us back to these familiar human landscapes now painted with the gun violence that has become part of daily life in America. Her poems show us the price we pay for the gun that has permeated American culture, the gun that is glorified by some, wreaks havoc for others, and of course kills and maims. She recognizes the “ghosts left lingering” for so many who have been affected by a gun, and our collective need to “look up to search the sky for a glimpse of sunlight,” and still, these poems do not look away. They consider the perspective of the victims, perpetrators, and especially those left behind to pick up their lives in the aftermath, those with no other choice but to go on in a world with “the thunder of guns in the distance.” These are important, bold and haunting poems. Read them and be changed.” –Tara Bray, author of Mistaken for Song (Persea, 2009), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize
PRINE PRIMED
an anthology
Edited by Adam Van Winkle
$9.99
ISBN: 979-8883341105
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Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The writing in Prine Primed are all tinged by John Prine and his music in some way. Herein are twenty-two writers that create an anthological soundtrack that can go next to your Prine records, on your music books shelf, or slot nicely into your grit lit collection.
an anthology
Edited by Adam Van Winkle
$9.99
ISBN: 979-8883341105
Order Here!
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The writing in Prine Primed are all tinged by John Prine and his music in some way. Herein are twenty-two writers that create an anthological soundtrack that can go next to your Prine records, on your music books shelf, or slot nicely into your grit lit collection.
RED HEADED WRITING
an anthology
Edited by Adam Van Winkle
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8873984534
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Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The writing and art in Red Headed Writing are all tinged by Willie Nelson's life and music in some way. Herein are thirty-two writers that create an anthological soundtrack that can go next to your Willie Nelson records, on your music books shelf or slot nicely into your grit lit collection.
Cowboy Jamboree Press
good grit lit.
an anthology
Edited by Adam Van Winkle
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8873984534
Order Here!
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The writing and art in Red Headed Writing are all tinged by Willie Nelson's life and music in some way. Herein are thirty-two writers that create an anthological soundtrack that can go next to your Willie Nelson records, on your music books shelf or slot nicely into your grit lit collection.
Cowboy Jamboree Press
good grit lit.
SUNDOWN
an anthology
Edited by Patrick Trotti & Adam Van Winkle
$8.99
ISBN: 979-8875828034
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Cowboy Jamboree Press and LEFTOVER Books are proud to present this joint anthology as part of a continuing series inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The writing in Sundown is tinged by Gordon Lightfoot's life and lyrics in some way. Herein are nine writers that create an anthological soundtrack that can go next to your Lightfoot records, on your music books shelf or slot nicely into your grit lit collection. Featuring Stephen Pierce, John Weagly, Steve Novak, Mark Rogers, Derek R. Smith, Karl Koweski, Anthony Neil Smith, Patrick Trotti, and Adam Van Winkle.
LEFTOVER Books
Cowboy Jamboree Press
an anthology
Edited by Patrick Trotti & Adam Van Winkle
$8.99
ISBN: 979-8875828034
Order Here!
Cowboy Jamboree Press and LEFTOVER Books are proud to present this joint anthology as part of a continuing series inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The writing in Sundown is tinged by Gordon Lightfoot's life and lyrics in some way. Herein are nine writers that create an anthological soundtrack that can go next to your Lightfoot records, on your music books shelf or slot nicely into your grit lit collection. Featuring Stephen Pierce, John Weagly, Steve Novak, Mark Rogers, Derek R. Smith, Karl Koweski, Anthony Neil Smith, Patrick Trotti, and Adam Van Winkle.
LEFTOVER Books
Cowboy Jamboree Press
ALICE
by Sheldon Lee Compton
$8.99
ISBN: 979-8863372709
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Adelard starts off dying and spends a long time in a strange gray world of undeath searching for his elusive and magically shapeshifting wife, Alice. Along the way he battles the mythological Native American beast the Wendigo, spends time trapped as a hungry ghost, a bored immortal, and, at times, the Wendigo itself. Alice is an imaginative exploration that blurs the lines between myth and fact, what is imagined and what is true, and the artistic lie of fiction in getting to a deeper truth.
“Held in a cryptic in-between place fraught with many Alices, new bodies that struggle to know hunger and monsters that once were men, Compton’s Alice boldly unfurls itself. With every sentence a poem and its vibrant imagery, Compton completely captures.” –xTx, author of Today I Am a Book
“Poetic, strange, mythic, and true, this work by Sheldon Lee Compton will take your breath away. It’s life and death and love and loss. It’s survival and transformation. The artistry is reminiscent of Matt Bell, but it’s Compton’s inimitable voice that shines through each and every page of this novella. Highly recommended.” –Kathy Fish, author of Rift and Together We Can Bury It
by Sheldon Lee Compton
$8.99
ISBN: 979-8863372709
Order Here!
Adelard starts off dying and spends a long time in a strange gray world of undeath searching for his elusive and magically shapeshifting wife, Alice. Along the way he battles the mythological Native American beast the Wendigo, spends time trapped as a hungry ghost, a bored immortal, and, at times, the Wendigo itself. Alice is an imaginative exploration that blurs the lines between myth and fact, what is imagined and what is true, and the artistic lie of fiction in getting to a deeper truth.
“Held in a cryptic in-between place fraught with many Alices, new bodies that struggle to know hunger and monsters that once were men, Compton’s Alice boldly unfurls itself. With every sentence a poem and its vibrant imagery, Compton completely captures.” –xTx, author of Today I Am a Book
“Poetic, strange, mythic, and true, this work by Sheldon Lee Compton will take your breath away. It’s life and death and love and loss. It’s survival and transformation. The artistry is reminiscent of Matt Bell, but it’s Compton’s inimitable voice that shines through each and every page of this novella. Highly recommended.” –Kathy Fish, author of Rift and Together We Can Bury It
Blur
a flash fiction collection
by Dan Crawley
$12.99
ISBN: 979-8393434274
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“Dan Crawley’s fictions fly from the page like ghosted bottle rockets— nothing is what it seems, but everything seems itself so vividly. Unforgettable characters like Backslid Jesus tangle with bougainvillea vines in a series of flashes that risk the most uncomfortable parts of our human selves. 'Probability is not always on the side of truth,' Kleist wrote. Crawley’s haunted characters know this. It is the gift of this writer to make us feel each improbability could not have been otherwise. Fiction— alive, gilled, and gutting—is the strangest truth.” --Alina Stefanescu, author of Dor
a flash fiction collection
by Dan Crawley
$12.99
ISBN: 979-8393434274
Order Here!
“Dan Crawley’s fictions fly from the page like ghosted bottle rockets— nothing is what it seems, but everything seems itself so vividly. Unforgettable characters like Backslid Jesus tangle with bougainvillea vines in a series of flashes that risk the most uncomfortable parts of our human selves. 'Probability is not always on the side of truth,' Kleist wrote. Crawley’s haunted characters know this. It is the gift of this writer to make us feel each improbability could not have been otherwise. Fiction— alive, gilled, and gutting—is the strangest truth.” --Alina Stefanescu, author of Dor
Travelin' Thru Townes
edited by Adam Van Winkle
$9.99
ISBN: 979-8386473792
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Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The writing and art in Travelin' Thru Townes are all tinged by Townes Van Zandt's life and music in some way. Herein are eighteen writers and artists that create an anthological soundtrack that can go next to your Van Zandt records, on your music books shelf or slot nicely into your grit lit collection. Featuring William Taylor Jr., Brian Beatty, Clem Flowers, Margaret Sefton, Anthony Lawrence, Joe Kille, Kent Rose, Barbara Byar, Burke de Boer, Teddy Griffith, Vincent Cellucci, David Mihalyov, Karl Koweski, John Yohe, Mark Rogers, Charles March, Colin Brightwell, and Sheldon Lee Compton.
edited by Adam Van Winkle
$9.99
ISBN: 979-8386473792
Order Here!
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The writing and art in Travelin' Thru Townes are all tinged by Townes Van Zandt's life and music in some way. Herein are eighteen writers and artists that create an anthological soundtrack that can go next to your Van Zandt records, on your music books shelf or slot nicely into your grit lit collection. Featuring William Taylor Jr., Brian Beatty, Clem Flowers, Margaret Sefton, Anthony Lawrence, Joe Kille, Kent Rose, Barbara Byar, Burke de Boer, Teddy Griffith, Vincent Cellucci, David Mihalyov, Karl Koweski, John Yohe, Mark Rogers, Charles March, Colin Brightwell, and Sheldon Lee Compton.
Roads
Daren Dean
$16.99
ISBN: 979-8373634687
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"Roads confirms Daren Dean as an important new voice in rural noir." — Ron Rash, New York Times Bestselling author of Serena and The World Made Straight
Fifteen-year-old Dannie Gail Posey is a small-town girl with dreams of escaping her roots on Posey Hill. When the Glencairn Sheriff brings home her now catatonic older sister, Carley, who has fallen victim to abuse by someone in the infamous Lynch family—Dannie’s world is shaken to its core. When the Sheriff and even her Uncle Smith Posey, known and feared since his youth, concede there’s nothing to be done, Dannie struggles with the injustice of it all and vows to make it right. She charges her Uncle Smith with the responsibility of confronting the worst Lynch of them all, Russell Lynch.
The dark country roads of Cote Sans Dessein county keep their secrets hidden with a smothering embrace. Roads is a powerful story of revenge, justice, salvation, retribution. Dannie discovers an inner strength in a family that seems to hold no one dear. This is a tale that will tear you up worse than the chorus from an old religious hymn.
With the same grit and gothic prose of his recent works, The Black Harvest and This Vale of Tears, that have earned him praise as "The poet laureate of fallen angels" (Robert Olen Butler), Daren Dean has written an indelible story that stays with the reader like a neck tattoo. Not since Dorothy Allison’s Bone or Larry Brown’s Fay, have we seen such a fierce young woman.
Daren Dean
$16.99
ISBN: 979-8373634687
Order Here!
"Roads confirms Daren Dean as an important new voice in rural noir." — Ron Rash, New York Times Bestselling author of Serena and The World Made Straight
Fifteen-year-old Dannie Gail Posey is a small-town girl with dreams of escaping her roots on Posey Hill. When the Glencairn Sheriff brings home her now catatonic older sister, Carley, who has fallen victim to abuse by someone in the infamous Lynch family—Dannie’s world is shaken to its core. When the Sheriff and even her Uncle Smith Posey, known and feared since his youth, concede there’s nothing to be done, Dannie struggles with the injustice of it all and vows to make it right. She charges her Uncle Smith with the responsibility of confronting the worst Lynch of them all, Russell Lynch.
The dark country roads of Cote Sans Dessein county keep their secrets hidden with a smothering embrace. Roads is a powerful story of revenge, justice, salvation, retribution. Dannie discovers an inner strength in a family that seems to hold no one dear. This is a tale that will tear you up worse than the chorus from an old religious hymn.
With the same grit and gothic prose of his recent works, The Black Harvest and This Vale of Tears, that have earned him praise as "The poet laureate of fallen angels" (Robert Olen Butler), Daren Dean has written an indelible story that stays with the reader like a neck tattoo. Not since Dorothy Allison’s Bone or Larry Brown’s Fay, have we seen such a fierce young woman.
THREE BY TUITE: Her Skin is a Costume; Domestic Apparitions; Bound by Blue
Meg Tuite
$16.99
ISBN: 979-8373629799
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Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present, now back in print, 3 outstanding works from Meg Tuite: the chapbook Her Skin is a Costume, the novel Domestic Apparitions, and the short story collection Bound by Blue.
“Meg Tuite writes these stories like secret storms. You won’t notice until after how wrecked the lawn of your brain has become, as these stories sneak up and roll over you in the best way. Tuite’s characters are the bravest frightened animals, caught out in a bright light—their beautiful, terrible choices exposed and devastating.” —Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies
Meg Tuite
$16.99
ISBN: 979-8373629799
Order Here!
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present, now back in print, 3 outstanding works from Meg Tuite: the chapbook Her Skin is a Costume, the novel Domestic Apparitions, and the short story collection Bound by Blue.
“Meg Tuite writes these stories like secret storms. You won’t notice until after how wrecked the lawn of your brain has become, as these stories sneak up and roll over you in the best way. Tuite’s characters are the bravest frightened animals, caught out in a bright light—their beautiful, terrible choices exposed and devastating.” —Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies
STORIES WRESTLING CAN TELL
Michael Chin
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8373636049
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Professional wrestling is a spectacle. Beyond that, though, it can be a source of emotion, an inspiration, and an evocation of nostalgia. Wrestling can be a love story. And wrestling, too, can tell stories of immigration, advancement, and inheritances passed amongst family. These are the stories this essay collection shares, with forays into the absurd, the speculative, and the lines between four generations of men from the author’s family.
“Stories Wrestling Can Tell is a book about family, about what it means to believe in and to be believed in by the people you love. These essays hit body slams, bionic elbows, and frog splashes from the top rope as they show Michael Chin’s love for the over-the-top world of pro wrestling alongside his experiences as a biracial man who grapples with being a father, husband, and son. Chin reminds us that sometimes the most important thing about pro wrestling is what happens in the ring, and sometimes pro wrestling’s real value shines when we get to share it with the people who are most important to us. What a poignantly fun book.”
— W. Todd Kaneko, author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies
Michael Chin
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8373636049
Order Here!
Professional wrestling is a spectacle. Beyond that, though, it can be a source of emotion, an inspiration, and an evocation of nostalgia. Wrestling can be a love story. And wrestling, too, can tell stories of immigration, advancement, and inheritances passed amongst family. These are the stories this essay collection shares, with forays into the absurd, the speculative, and the lines between four generations of men from the author’s family.
“Stories Wrestling Can Tell is a book about family, about what it means to believe in and to be believed in by the people you love. These essays hit body slams, bionic elbows, and frog splashes from the top rope as they show Michael Chin’s love for the over-the-top world of pro wrestling alongside his experiences as a biracial man who grapples with being a father, husband, and son. Chin reminds us that sometimes the most important thing about pro wrestling is what happens in the ring, and sometimes pro wrestling’s real value shines when we get to share it with the people who are most important to us. What a poignantly fun book.”
— W. Todd Kaneko, author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies
Hank Mighta Done It This Way
ed. Adam Van Winkle
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8366496223
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Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The stories, verse, essays, and art in Hank Mighta Done It This Way are all tinged by Hank William's voice and music in some way. Herein are eighteen writers and artists that create an anthological soundtrack that can go on the shelf next to your old country records collection or slot nicely into your grit lit library. Featuring Alex DiFrancesco, William R. Soldan, Meg Tuite, Dan Crawley, Travis Cravey, Clem Flowers, Nils Gilbertson, Kent Rose, David P. Barker, Timothy Dodd, Colin Brightwell, Bram Riddlebarger, Adam Shaw, Alfred Stifsim, Anthony Neil Smith, Joey R. Poole, Michel Lee Garrett, and David Lambert.
ed. Adam Van Winkle
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8366496223
Order Here!
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The stories, verse, essays, and art in Hank Mighta Done It This Way are all tinged by Hank William's voice and music in some way. Herein are eighteen writers and artists that create an anthological soundtrack that can go on the shelf next to your old country records collection or slot nicely into your grit lit library. Featuring Alex DiFrancesco, William R. Soldan, Meg Tuite, Dan Crawley, Travis Cravey, Clem Flowers, Nils Gilbertson, Kent Rose, David P. Barker, Timothy Dodd, Colin Brightwell, Bram Riddlebarger, Adam Shaw, Alfred Stifsim, Anthony Neil Smith, Joey R. Poole, Michel Lee Garrett, and David Lambert.
BLUE BOB
ed. Adam Van Winkle
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8366492065
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Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The stories, verse, essays, and art in Blue Bob are all tinged by Bob Dylan's voice and music in some way. Herein are eighteen writers and artists that create an anthological soundtrack that can go on your Dylan records and books shelves or slot nicely into your grit lit collection. Featuring Matthew Ingate, Reagan M. Sova, Clem Flowers, Michael Chin, Daren Dean, Patricia Q. Bidar, John Waddy Bullion, Amy Bassin, Mark Blickley, Mark Rogers, Jeff Esterholm, Adam Van Winkle, Matthew J. Andrews, Zach Murphy, Viola LaBounty, A.A. Rubin, Dia VanGunten, and David Lambert.
ed. Adam Van Winkle
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8366492065
Order Here!
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present its series of anthologies inspired, influenced and incited by our country and folk musical heroes. The stories, verse, essays, and art in Blue Bob are all tinged by Bob Dylan's voice and music in some way. Herein are eighteen writers and artists that create an anthological soundtrack that can go on your Dylan records and books shelves or slot nicely into your grit lit collection. Featuring Matthew Ingate, Reagan M. Sova, Clem Flowers, Michael Chin, Daren Dean, Patricia Q. Bidar, John Waddy Bullion, Amy Bassin, Mark Blickley, Mark Rogers, Jeff Esterholm, Adam Van Winkle, Matthew J. Andrews, Zach Murphy, Viola LaBounty, A.A. Rubin, Dia VanGunten, and David Lambert.
The Book of Rusty
Benjamin Drevlow
$15.99
ISBN: 979-8356450686
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Another testament of Benjamin Drevlow
An inventive structure and dark humor balance the raw heartbreak of this honest and brutal cultural critique disguised as a comedy. No one writes about toxic masculinity with as much bravery and empathy as Ben Drevlow.
–Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs, Editor-in-Chief of Reckon Review
What I want to say about The Book of Rusty feels like praise Rusty himself wouldn’t accept: he tends to shrug off whatever encouragement comes his way, usually with something funny or profane or self-deprecating. But whether or not he’d agree, this is a time-bending, mind-bending book of misadventures in which a guy who can’t catch a break tries like hell to save his own life, whether that means walking through traffic in stolen underwear or finding the words to tell a story about it.
–Caitlin Horrocks author of The Vexations, Life Among the Terranauts, and This Is Not Your City
One hand cleaning the shitter and the other busy writing his mem-wah is where we meet our main man Rusty. Do you want the truth or do you want a story? Well, Rusty’s doing his best to give the world both if he could only catch a break that isn’t his own nose. If you’re looking for a fairytale you can stop reading now. This is a story of humanity and how real life shakes out for the great big all of us who dare to wake up in the morning. And when you deal in the prickly thicket of human-ness, things tend to get a little dirty and painful. The Book of Rusty covers love, loss, basketball, time travel, and the entire gamut of human existence at a page tearing speed. Get in and buckle up, naked angel lady, we’re going back in time, and forward again.
–Micah Schnable, singer/guitarist of Two Cow Garage
The Book of Rusty is a circus fest of outsiders and freaks, thrown into a masterful whirlpool of mayhem. Drevlow is a skillful ratskellar tale-teller, drawing from dregs and putrid ripening of growth, splintering into unforeseen factions. Rusty wrings the reader out with its unrelenting twists, its downspun dogma, its rope-a-dope brilliance! You won’t want to put it down!
–Robert Vaughan, author of ASKEW
Drevlow weaves a tumultuous coming-of-age fevered carnival. The Book of Rusty is a time-bending kaleidoscope of past and present, straddles the trauma of adolescence, ruptured family tragedy, and the heft of parental dismissal. Clawing over landmines of guilt and rage, Drevlow’s staggering pathos, implodes with the claustrophobic culmination of hemmed in yesterdays. Get a copy! Unforgettable and urgent. LOVE!
–Meg Tuite, author of White Van
Benjamin Drevlow is not one to pull punches. The Book of Rusty is where he hits hardest with incisive prose that communicate a story about masculinity, ambition, basketball, love, cycles, the nature of time, storytelling itself, and plenty more. Drevlow’s greatest gift to his readers is a compulsion toward truth in all things, as even the smallest victories are earned via grit and blunt-force trauma. The reader can’t help but root for Rusty when his chances at glory are slimmest and most distant. In the end, Rusty represents something fundamental about this foolhardy endeavor we call humanity, and no one has told the tale with quite Drevlow’s vision before.
–Mike Chin, author of My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So Is Yours
Drevlow has spent his career bleeding on the page and how there’s any blood left is nothing short of a miracle. And that’s what this is. A miracle of truth and a miracle of life. Here is a testament that breathes and bruises and, ultimately, heals.
–Jared Yates Sexton, author of The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making
Benjamin Drevlow
$15.99
ISBN: 979-8356450686
Order Here!
Another testament of Benjamin Drevlow
An inventive structure and dark humor balance the raw heartbreak of this honest and brutal cultural critique disguised as a comedy. No one writes about toxic masculinity with as much bravery and empathy as Ben Drevlow.
–Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs, Editor-in-Chief of Reckon Review
What I want to say about The Book of Rusty feels like praise Rusty himself wouldn’t accept: he tends to shrug off whatever encouragement comes his way, usually with something funny or profane or self-deprecating. But whether or not he’d agree, this is a time-bending, mind-bending book of misadventures in which a guy who can’t catch a break tries like hell to save his own life, whether that means walking through traffic in stolen underwear or finding the words to tell a story about it.
–Caitlin Horrocks author of The Vexations, Life Among the Terranauts, and This Is Not Your City
One hand cleaning the shitter and the other busy writing his mem-wah is where we meet our main man Rusty. Do you want the truth or do you want a story? Well, Rusty’s doing his best to give the world both if he could only catch a break that isn’t his own nose. If you’re looking for a fairytale you can stop reading now. This is a story of humanity and how real life shakes out for the great big all of us who dare to wake up in the morning. And when you deal in the prickly thicket of human-ness, things tend to get a little dirty and painful. The Book of Rusty covers love, loss, basketball, time travel, and the entire gamut of human existence at a page tearing speed. Get in and buckle up, naked angel lady, we’re going back in time, and forward again.
–Micah Schnable, singer/guitarist of Two Cow Garage
The Book of Rusty is a circus fest of outsiders and freaks, thrown into a masterful whirlpool of mayhem. Drevlow is a skillful ratskellar tale-teller, drawing from dregs and putrid ripening of growth, splintering into unforeseen factions. Rusty wrings the reader out with its unrelenting twists, its downspun dogma, its rope-a-dope brilliance! You won’t want to put it down!
–Robert Vaughan, author of ASKEW
Drevlow weaves a tumultuous coming-of-age fevered carnival. The Book of Rusty is a time-bending kaleidoscope of past and present, straddles the trauma of adolescence, ruptured family tragedy, and the heft of parental dismissal. Clawing over landmines of guilt and rage, Drevlow’s staggering pathos, implodes with the claustrophobic culmination of hemmed in yesterdays. Get a copy! Unforgettable and urgent. LOVE!
–Meg Tuite, author of White Van
Benjamin Drevlow is not one to pull punches. The Book of Rusty is where he hits hardest with incisive prose that communicate a story about masculinity, ambition, basketball, love, cycles, the nature of time, storytelling itself, and plenty more. Drevlow’s greatest gift to his readers is a compulsion toward truth in all things, as even the smallest victories are earned via grit and blunt-force trauma. The reader can’t help but root for Rusty when his chances at glory are slimmest and most distant. In the end, Rusty represents something fundamental about this foolhardy endeavor we call humanity, and no one has told the tale with quite Drevlow’s vision before.
–Mike Chin, author of My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So Is Yours
Drevlow has spent his career bleeding on the page and how there’s any blood left is nothing short of a miracle. And that’s what this is. A miracle of truth and a miracle of life. Here is a testament that breathes and bruises and, ultimately, heals.
–Jared Yates Sexton, author of The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making
Order Here!
Men in Midnight Bloom
Timothy Dodd
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8847201742
Presenting the land and life of his native West Virginia, Timothy Dodd probes the complex and fragile lives of men in their darkest shadows. With fierce characterizations rooted in Appalachian settings and mindedness, these stories reject the clear dreams and simple paths to redemption, focusing instead on the struggles to navigate and find conscience. Nesting in the somber conflicts, however, thrive strong moments of vision, humor, and the truth of experience, all hanging under a canopy of myth and symbol, the land and the past—often relegated in the minds of men, but vital nonetheless. Showing that darkness and light, life and death, are not so distinct from each other, the collection flashes its paradox in the title itself: Men in Midnight Bloom are tales pushing into not only the heart of loss and destruction, but also the long and precarious search for place and understanding in the modern world.
Men in Midnight Bloom
Timothy Dodd
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8847201742
Presenting the land and life of his native West Virginia, Timothy Dodd probes the complex and fragile lives of men in their darkest shadows. With fierce characterizations rooted in Appalachian settings and mindedness, these stories reject the clear dreams and simple paths to redemption, focusing instead on the struggles to navigate and find conscience. Nesting in the somber conflicts, however, thrive strong moments of vision, humor, and the truth of experience, all hanging under a canopy of myth and symbol, the land and the past—often relegated in the minds of men, but vital nonetheless. Showing that darkness and light, life and death, are not so distinct from each other, the collection flashes its paradox in the title itself: Men in Midnight Bloom are tales pushing into not only the heart of loss and destruction, but also the long and precarious search for place and understanding in the modern world.
Order Here!
The Orchard Is Full of Sound
one author's connection with Breece D'J Pancake: a memoir
Sheldon Lee Compton
$13.99
ISBN: 9798439128341
In this superb memoir Sheldon Lee Compton reflects on his own life, his struggles with poverty and divorce and violence and addiction and fatherhood and an early heart attack and trying to make it as a writer in rural Kentucky, all the while trying to trace the life and tragic ending of one of his literary heroes, Breece D'J Pancake. The book is part overcoming, part acceptance, part reflection on Appalachia and its stereotypes, part study in suicide among the creative. Compton seeks closure on Pancake's suicide when he travels to Pancake's last home, to the orchard where Pancake did the deed, and in doing so finds new perspective on the tragic events of his own life.
The Orchard Is Full of Sound
one author's connection with Breece D'J Pancake: a memoir
Sheldon Lee Compton
$13.99
ISBN: 9798439128341
In this superb memoir Sheldon Lee Compton reflects on his own life, his struggles with poverty and divorce and violence and addiction and fatherhood and an early heart attack and trying to make it as a writer in rural Kentucky, all the while trying to trace the life and tragic ending of one of his literary heroes, Breece D'J Pancake. The book is part overcoming, part acceptance, part reflection on Appalachia and its stereotypes, part study in suicide among the creative. Compton seeks closure on Pancake's suicide when he travels to Pancake's last home, to the orchard where Pancake did the deed, and in doing so finds new perspective on the tragic events of his own life.
Order Here!!
ASKEW
Robert Vaughan
$9.99
ISBN: 979-8422563999
Robert Vaughan’s ASKEW works by association—one thought, one image, one moment tumbling into the next—yet the effect on the reader is a self emerging from the fragments, a self trying to make sense of the world as it skitters away, just out of reach. The effect is to bring us closer to what it feels like to be alive.
-Nick Flynn, author This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Reading Robert Vaughan's ASKEW is like stepping into the very layers of his own skin. The movements from phrase to phrase become your self-same secret knowledge. Some writers offer windows into their heart; Robert Vaughan gives you his outright, gifting it one beat at a time and with complete commitment.
- Sheldon Lee Compton, author of The Collected Stories: Sheldon Lee Compton and The Orchard is Full of Sound
If everything has a label, Robert Vaughan is here to peel back the sticker and run his mouth across the residual chemical traces. ASKEW speaks for the askance, the sidereal, the sidelong glance when leaving a bus in a town filled with strangers, while asking more difficult questions about the stability of identity and selfhood in a shifting world. To decay and reconvene in the ruins, to meet the speaker among the crumbling rocks, to find words for the shapes of our absence--to be alive in the ravish of that.
-Alina Stefanescu, author of Dor and Ribald
I always turn to Robert Vaughan whenever I need a good kick in the language pants, a waft of "salacious breeze" cut with "a swallow's shriek." In his latest collection, ASKEW, Vaughan continues to honor the "small madness where senses reel behind the eyes." Ache runs rampant, fractured by longing: for places and people, arrested moments, former selves, fleeting lovers. These may be compact poems and microfictions, but don't underestimate their size: Vaughan approaches the page with an honest, elastic and heartfelt expansiveness that holds space for us all.
-Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace: Stories
In Robert Vaughan’s newest collection, ASKEW, we see how things fall apart, from the temporariness of our relationships to our humanmade world filled with ex-lovers and the ex-living, and many times with a questioning: what is there to lose? Vaughan is a master of story and each poem creates a scene where we carve out a life / among automatic updates / daylight savings or / bonuses on Wall Street. Fearless, engaging, eclectic, and open, Vaughan’s poems are unafraid to move from image to image and throughout the world—from the speaker getting news his mother died while in a SoHo Starbucks to I’d once loved an / ornithologist who studied parrots / in the Australian outback. These are gifts of Vaughan’s poems; they take us with them while bringing harps and hunger and moonlight to share the intimacies of life—yes, fragments surround us, yes, this shattered road, but these poems come together to connect and give voice and reminding us--Look how I touch the world, not as myself, but as an echo of who I was.
-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides
ASKEW
Robert Vaughan
$9.99
ISBN: 979-8422563999
Robert Vaughan’s ASKEW works by association—one thought, one image, one moment tumbling into the next—yet the effect on the reader is a self emerging from the fragments, a self trying to make sense of the world as it skitters away, just out of reach. The effect is to bring us closer to what it feels like to be alive.
-Nick Flynn, author This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Reading Robert Vaughan's ASKEW is like stepping into the very layers of his own skin. The movements from phrase to phrase become your self-same secret knowledge. Some writers offer windows into their heart; Robert Vaughan gives you his outright, gifting it one beat at a time and with complete commitment.
- Sheldon Lee Compton, author of The Collected Stories: Sheldon Lee Compton and The Orchard is Full of Sound
If everything has a label, Robert Vaughan is here to peel back the sticker and run his mouth across the residual chemical traces. ASKEW speaks for the askance, the sidereal, the sidelong glance when leaving a bus in a town filled with strangers, while asking more difficult questions about the stability of identity and selfhood in a shifting world. To decay and reconvene in the ruins, to meet the speaker among the crumbling rocks, to find words for the shapes of our absence--to be alive in the ravish of that.
-Alina Stefanescu, author of Dor and Ribald
I always turn to Robert Vaughan whenever I need a good kick in the language pants, a waft of "salacious breeze" cut with "a swallow's shriek." In his latest collection, ASKEW, Vaughan continues to honor the "small madness where senses reel behind the eyes." Ache runs rampant, fractured by longing: for places and people, arrested moments, former selves, fleeting lovers. These may be compact poems and microfictions, but don't underestimate their size: Vaughan approaches the page with an honest, elastic and heartfelt expansiveness that holds space for us all.
-Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace: Stories
In Robert Vaughan’s newest collection, ASKEW, we see how things fall apart, from the temporariness of our relationships to our humanmade world filled with ex-lovers and the ex-living, and many times with a questioning: what is there to lose? Vaughan is a master of story and each poem creates a scene where we carve out a life / among automatic updates / daylight savings or / bonuses on Wall Street. Fearless, engaging, eclectic, and open, Vaughan’s poems are unafraid to move from image to image and throughout the world—from the speaker getting news his mother died while in a SoHo Starbucks to I’d once loved an / ornithologist who studied parrots / in the Australian outback. These are gifts of Vaughan’s poems; they take us with them while bringing harps and hunger and moonlight to share the intimacies of life—yes, fragments surround us, yes, this shattered road, but these poems come together to connect and give voice and reminding us--Look how I touch the world, not as myself, but as an echo of who I was.
-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides
ORDER HERE!!
THE COLLECTED STORIES: SHELDON LEE COMPTON
Sheldon Lee Compton
$22.99
ISBN: 9798758891049
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present the entire short story oeuvre of the great Sheldon Lee Compton in one volume. Herein are all of Compton's previously published collections--The Same Terrible Storm, Where Alligators Sleep, Absolute Invention, and Sway--along with eleven previously uncollected gems. Get lost in the Appalachian gothic fiction of one of the best story writers today, the man David Joy has called "the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet."
THE COLLECTED STORIES: SHELDON LEE COMPTON
Sheldon Lee Compton
$22.99
ISBN: 9798758891049
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present the entire short story oeuvre of the great Sheldon Lee Compton in one volume. Herein are all of Compton's previously published collections--The Same Terrible Storm, Where Alligators Sleep, Absolute Invention, and Sway--along with eleven previously uncollected gems. Get lost in the Appalachian gothic fiction of one of the best story writers today, the man David Joy has called "the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet."
ORDER HERE!!
THE PERSISTANCE OF INSTABILITY
Patrick Trotti
$13.99
ISBN: 9798758970690
Set in the rundown and forgotten Main Street’s of small-town America, The Persistence of Instability showcases all that is wrong with the human psyche while offering glimpses of better times. In these fifteen stories, Patrick Trotti creates a world both frighteningly familiar and altogether otherworldly. Featuring ten never before published stories, this collection delves into the gritty realism of people living on the periphery of society.
"There are writers who can take us to places of hardship, desperation, and hopelessness, but Patrick Trotti does more than take us there. Trotti transforms us so fully that the hardship, desperation, and hopelessness becomes our own. You are with the single mother at her AA meeting, trembling with the father who feels he has no options left but one. What Trotti does is magical. And he does it with the most broken materials he can find. The Persistence of Instability is a monument to those broken, and a witness to all that’s possible within a determined heart.” ~Sheldon Lee Compton, author of Sway and Dysphoria: an Appalachian Gothic
THE PERSISTANCE OF INSTABILITY
Patrick Trotti
$13.99
ISBN: 9798758970690
Set in the rundown and forgotten Main Street’s of small-town America, The Persistence of Instability showcases all that is wrong with the human psyche while offering glimpses of better times. In these fifteen stories, Patrick Trotti creates a world both frighteningly familiar and altogether otherworldly. Featuring ten never before published stories, this collection delves into the gritty realism of people living on the periphery of society.
"There are writers who can take us to places of hardship, desperation, and hopelessness, but Patrick Trotti does more than take us there. Trotti transforms us so fully that the hardship, desperation, and hopelessness becomes our own. You are with the single mother at her AA meeting, trembling with the father who feels he has no options left but one. What Trotti does is magical. And he does it with the most broken materials he can find. The Persistence of Instability is a monument to those broken, and a witness to all that’s possible within a determined heart.” ~Sheldon Lee Compton, author of Sway and Dysphoria: an Appalachian Gothic
Order Benjamin Drevlow's A GOOD RAM IS HARD TO FIND by clicking here!
A GOOD RAM IS HARD TO FIND
Benjamin Drevlow
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8487367860
“These stories capture the gritty realities of traditional masculinity falling apart. The quiet intensity of stoic fathers give way to big hearted sons who take in the world unguarded. This raw, brutally honest voice had me swinging between hysterical laughter and profound awe. Each page is magnetic and I’m now a forever fan of Drevlow’s writing.”
~Devin Murphy, National Bestselling author of The Boat Runner and Tiny Americans.
“Oh my oh my! What a gritty and poetic bunch of crazy-ass stories! Benjamin Drevlow’s A Good Ram is Hard to Find is chock-a-block filled with lonely, troubled misfits searching for kernels of sweetness in their hardscrabble, hard-luck lives. Even while forlorn and forsaken, abused and misunderstood, each character holds tight to their good-hearted, if twisted, sense of humor. Written with guts and pathos, these wonderful tales spark and fizz with an energy that makes this book hard to put down. Find a comfy place to settle in and consume this juicy collection. I’m sure glad I did.”
~Alice Kaltman, author of Dawg Towne
“What a mysterious and honest book. A Good Ram is Hard to Find captures the everyday violence of poverty, and the strange, beautiful tenacity of people living on the fringe of the working class. Together these stories capture every dark, electric detail of the least populated landscapes of modern America as we descend into what feels like the last days of late capitalism. Each story here lives and breathes and trembles like a living human.”
~Chris Dennis author of Here is What You Do
“Benjamin Drevlow comes at the reader with a logging chain and a tattoo needle and asks, which is it going to be? Your head or your heart? Can you smell my imagery? He writes true grit lit like the redheaded stepchild of Flannery O'Connor and Harry Crews. Be warned, his humor has a crosscut serrated bite to it. In the title story, “A Good Ram is Hard to Find,” a young man struggles to win back his ram's dignity (the ram's name, Arnold Schwarzenegger) and at the same time struggles to discover how to become a man despite the bad hand life dealt him in the family department. In “Mama's Little Helper” a manipulative mama makes her big boy and her brother-in-law complicit in the murder of her husband in a gritty, grotesque, and paradoxically hopeful story about truth you might expect from a writer like Donald Ray Pollock. Drevlow knows, like any good southern writer, that life can be heartbreaking, freakish, and ludicrous all at once. A breakthrough writer you have to know!”
~Daren Dean, author of Far Beyond the Pale, The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War, I'll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone: Stories, and This Vale of Tears
A GOOD RAM IS HARD TO FIND
Benjamin Drevlow
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8487367860
“These stories capture the gritty realities of traditional masculinity falling apart. The quiet intensity of stoic fathers give way to big hearted sons who take in the world unguarded. This raw, brutally honest voice had me swinging between hysterical laughter and profound awe. Each page is magnetic and I’m now a forever fan of Drevlow’s writing.”
~Devin Murphy, National Bestselling author of The Boat Runner and Tiny Americans.
“Oh my oh my! What a gritty and poetic bunch of crazy-ass stories! Benjamin Drevlow’s A Good Ram is Hard to Find is chock-a-block filled with lonely, troubled misfits searching for kernels of sweetness in their hardscrabble, hard-luck lives. Even while forlorn and forsaken, abused and misunderstood, each character holds tight to their good-hearted, if twisted, sense of humor. Written with guts and pathos, these wonderful tales spark and fizz with an energy that makes this book hard to put down. Find a comfy place to settle in and consume this juicy collection. I’m sure glad I did.”
~Alice Kaltman, author of Dawg Towne
“What a mysterious and honest book. A Good Ram is Hard to Find captures the everyday violence of poverty, and the strange, beautiful tenacity of people living on the fringe of the working class. Together these stories capture every dark, electric detail of the least populated landscapes of modern America as we descend into what feels like the last days of late capitalism. Each story here lives and breathes and trembles like a living human.”
~Chris Dennis author of Here is What You Do
“Benjamin Drevlow comes at the reader with a logging chain and a tattoo needle and asks, which is it going to be? Your head or your heart? Can you smell my imagery? He writes true grit lit like the redheaded stepchild of Flannery O'Connor and Harry Crews. Be warned, his humor has a crosscut serrated bite to it. In the title story, “A Good Ram is Hard to Find,” a young man struggles to win back his ram's dignity (the ram's name, Arnold Schwarzenegger) and at the same time struggles to discover how to become a man despite the bad hand life dealt him in the family department. In “Mama's Little Helper” a manipulative mama makes her big boy and her brother-in-law complicit in the murder of her husband in a gritty, grotesque, and paradoxically hopeful story about truth you might expect from a writer like Donald Ray Pollock. Drevlow knows, like any good southern writer, that life can be heartbreaking, freakish, and ludicrous all at once. A breakthrough writer you have to know!”
~Daren Dean, author of Far Beyond the Pale, The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War, I'll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone: Stories, and This Vale of Tears
Order Daren Dean's THIS VALE OF TEARS by clicking here!
THIS VALE OF TEARS
Daren Dean
$16.99
ISBN: 979-8487371959
From the author of Far Beyond the Pale, I’ll Still Be Here Long After You’re Gone: Stories, and The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War, comes a story of a sprawling cast of incorrigible and sometimes violent characters, each bent on their own quest to uncover meaning and find a place in the world. In a rave review HuffPost hailed Pale, “Visceral, authentic southern language flows throughout the starkly honest prose, performing a brutal, violent dance that is all at once hard to watch, yet impossible to turn away from.” Of The Black Harvest, Kirkus Reviews said, “Dean’s writing also offers a striking brew of poetry and punch, combining unflinching realism with delicately woven imagery.”
This Vale of Tears paints a searing picture, a clash of the gothic themes of good and evil, in the lives of rural people in the Show Me state. We follow the intertwined lives of Walker Scofield, a man who wonders where he went wrong with his children and grandchildren as his tenuous grip on reality begins to slip; Merle Scofield, Troy’s father, an alcoholic, who hopes to find the strength to unite his family; Troy Scofield, haunted by the memory of his mother (a former soap star) who walked out on the family when he was a boy and is determined to confront his wife's lover; Alisha Scofield, Troy’s insatiable wife tosses him aside for the arms of another man only to discover she wants him back; Glenny Scofield, a truant who steals a baby in a jar of formaldehyde from the local college museum leading to his transformation as The Boy of God; Theron Beecher, an old man who sometimes hears the voices of the dead imploring him to care for the embattled Scofields; Ruby Phelps, a fierce matriarch determined to exact her revenge on the Scofields; Cyrus Phelps, a sometimes bail bondsman and dog breeder and the brute instrument of Ruby’s retribution; Raelyn Phelps, a young woman who finds the strength to escape her family's overbearing confines and follow her heart's own song.
When Troy and Raelyn meet, they form an instant bond that will lead them on a cross country trip through the south to New Orleans in an effort to escape the strangling family ties of the past in the dark heart of the Little Dixie.
"Daren Dean's spectacular, distinct writing in This Vale of Tears brings us into the vivid and memorable worlds of the Scofield and Phelps families. This is a beautiful and affecting novel, and Daren Dean is a unique and powerful storyteller of the American South."
-Karen Bender, National Book Award Finalist and author of Refund, Like Normal People, The New Order, and others
THIS VALE OF TEARS
Daren Dean
$16.99
ISBN: 979-8487371959
From the author of Far Beyond the Pale, I’ll Still Be Here Long After You’re Gone: Stories, and The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War, comes a story of a sprawling cast of incorrigible and sometimes violent characters, each bent on their own quest to uncover meaning and find a place in the world. In a rave review HuffPost hailed Pale, “Visceral, authentic southern language flows throughout the starkly honest prose, performing a brutal, violent dance that is all at once hard to watch, yet impossible to turn away from.” Of The Black Harvest, Kirkus Reviews said, “Dean’s writing also offers a striking brew of poetry and punch, combining unflinching realism with delicately woven imagery.”
This Vale of Tears paints a searing picture, a clash of the gothic themes of good and evil, in the lives of rural people in the Show Me state. We follow the intertwined lives of Walker Scofield, a man who wonders where he went wrong with his children and grandchildren as his tenuous grip on reality begins to slip; Merle Scofield, Troy’s father, an alcoholic, who hopes to find the strength to unite his family; Troy Scofield, haunted by the memory of his mother (a former soap star) who walked out on the family when he was a boy and is determined to confront his wife's lover; Alisha Scofield, Troy’s insatiable wife tosses him aside for the arms of another man only to discover she wants him back; Glenny Scofield, a truant who steals a baby in a jar of formaldehyde from the local college museum leading to his transformation as The Boy of God; Theron Beecher, an old man who sometimes hears the voices of the dead imploring him to care for the embattled Scofields; Ruby Phelps, a fierce matriarch determined to exact her revenge on the Scofields; Cyrus Phelps, a sometimes bail bondsman and dog breeder and the brute instrument of Ruby’s retribution; Raelyn Phelps, a young woman who finds the strength to escape her family's overbearing confines and follow her heart's own song.
When Troy and Raelyn meet, they form an instant bond that will lead them on a cross country trip through the south to New Orleans in an effort to escape the strangling family ties of the past in the dark heart of the Little Dixie.
"Daren Dean's spectacular, distinct writing in This Vale of Tears brings us into the vivid and memorable worlds of the Scofield and Phelps families. This is a beautiful and affecting novel, and Daren Dean is a unique and powerful storyteller of the American South."
-Karen Bender, National Book Award Finalist and author of Refund, Like Normal People, The New Order, and others
Order Michael Chin's MY GRANDFATHER'S AN IMMIGRANT, AND SO IS YOURS by clicking here!
MY GRANDFATHER'S AN IMMIGRANT, AND SO IS YOURS
Michael Chin
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8472913669
Billy Chen grows up half-Chinese in a conservative small town in Upstate New York. The times are changing as relationships transform, the town’s history is uncovered, and the 2016 presidential election looms. My Grandfather’s an Immigrant and So is Yours probes the personal and the worldly, the timely and the timeless in a fragmented coming of age tale.
An elegant journey through the memories that shaped an adolescence, illuminating truths both universal and personal along the way. A quietly propulsive story that takes us in search of happiness and self at their most elemental.
~Karen Hattrup, author of Frannie and Tru and Our Year in Love and Parties
It’s difficult to put this book down without feeling sadness for all the kids who’ve had to sort through all the issues that have infantilized us as adults, but also a tentative optimism that writers like Chin will lead us toward a saner, more artful future.
~Benjamin Drevlow, author of Ina-Baby, A Love Story in Reverse and Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father
MY GRANDFATHER'S AN IMMIGRANT, AND SO IS YOURS
Michael Chin
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8472913669
Billy Chen grows up half-Chinese in a conservative small town in Upstate New York. The times are changing as relationships transform, the town’s history is uncovered, and the 2016 presidential election looms. My Grandfather’s an Immigrant and So is Yours probes the personal and the worldly, the timely and the timeless in a fragmented coming of age tale.
An elegant journey through the memories that shaped an adolescence, illuminating truths both universal and personal along the way. A quietly propulsive story that takes us in search of happiness and self at their most elemental.
~Karen Hattrup, author of Frannie and Tru and Our Year in Love and Parties
It’s difficult to put this book down without feeling sadness for all the kids who’ve had to sort through all the issues that have infantilized us as adults, but also a tentative optimism that writers like Chin will lead us toward a saner, more artful future.
~Benjamin Drevlow, author of Ina-Baby, A Love Story in Reverse and Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father
Order William R. Soldan's UNDONE VALLEY by clicking here!
UNDONE VALLEY
William R. Soldan
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8472908115
Twenty years after his father is murdered outside a rundown motel near their ruined Ohio mill town, college dropout Dalton Hartwell leads a quiet life of denial and repressed rage. He spends his days working as an on-call maintenance man for an apartment complex, where he lives and cares for his dying mother. But when a letter arrives one day, notifying him that Andrew Lareaux, the man who killed his father when he was just a boy, has been paroled from prison, it sets Dalton on an obsessive, uncertain journey in pursuit of the truth surrounding the tragic event.
Meanwhile, as Lareaux prepares for his release and tries to mend his fractured relationship with his estranged daughter, Ellie, he finds himself bound by blood to a vicious criminal organization, who plans to collect on his debt in unforeseen ways.
As the lives of these three characters converge and become entangled, a current of deception and despair pull them toward a violent confrontation, from which their only hope of escape is to join together in a desperate fight for survival.
Set amidst the blight and devastation of the American Rust Belt, Undone Valley is a grim, gritty novel about the secrets of the past, how they shape and direct the course of our lives, and the brutal truths that are better left buried.
“In Undone Valley, William R. Soldan achieves a thoughtful balance of the raw and dirty reality of poverty, addiction, and incarceration, with the tenacity and hope of his unforgettable characters. The result of this careful equilibrium is a heartbreaking story of the power of time to heal, but also to fester and stoke. I left this novel feeling like I actually knew these people, and this place, and for me there is no higher praise. Soldan is a master craftsman.”
—Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs
“William R. Soldan’s debut novel is full throttle brutal grit, dark thrills, and wild truths. A lot of writers have taken on rustbelt noir, the dying Ohio, but Soldan understands the place like no other. He’s come into his own with his latest book, a modern gut punch. He understands the graveyards of buildings. The promises lost in their shattered glass, and the whispers of lives long lost in the growing, brittle, grass that engulfs them. Soldan inhabits this rag-tag collection of characters that take you on a savage journey through the Undone Valley.”
—Frank Reardon, author of Nirvana Haymaker and Loud Love on the Sevens and Elevens
“William R. Soldan does what very few writers are able to do: he writes about ugly realities in a way that’s not just skillful, but brutally beautiful, leaving the reader breathless. Undone Valley is a blazing testament to that very fact.”
—Stephen J. Golds, author of Say Goodbye When I’m Gone and Always the Dead
“So much crime writing and Grit Lit seems bent on showing off just how tough and mean and lowdown it is. But William R. Soldan’s Undone Valley doesn’t need to show off. It comes by its grit naturally, with a flinty grace that permeates this beautiful, festering novel right up through its apocalyptic climax. When it comes to true grit, Soldan is the real deal.”
—Joey R. Poole, author of I Have Always Been Here Before
UNDONE VALLEY
William R. Soldan
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8472908115
Twenty years after his father is murdered outside a rundown motel near their ruined Ohio mill town, college dropout Dalton Hartwell leads a quiet life of denial and repressed rage. He spends his days working as an on-call maintenance man for an apartment complex, where he lives and cares for his dying mother. But when a letter arrives one day, notifying him that Andrew Lareaux, the man who killed his father when he was just a boy, has been paroled from prison, it sets Dalton on an obsessive, uncertain journey in pursuit of the truth surrounding the tragic event.
Meanwhile, as Lareaux prepares for his release and tries to mend his fractured relationship with his estranged daughter, Ellie, he finds himself bound by blood to a vicious criminal organization, who plans to collect on his debt in unforeseen ways.
As the lives of these three characters converge and become entangled, a current of deception and despair pull them toward a violent confrontation, from which their only hope of escape is to join together in a desperate fight for survival.
Set amidst the blight and devastation of the American Rust Belt, Undone Valley is a grim, gritty novel about the secrets of the past, how they shape and direct the course of our lives, and the brutal truths that are better left buried.
“In Undone Valley, William R. Soldan achieves a thoughtful balance of the raw and dirty reality of poverty, addiction, and incarceration, with the tenacity and hope of his unforgettable characters. The result of this careful equilibrium is a heartbreaking story of the power of time to heal, but also to fester and stoke. I left this novel feeling like I actually knew these people, and this place, and for me there is no higher praise. Soldan is a master craftsman.”
—Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs
“William R. Soldan’s debut novel is full throttle brutal grit, dark thrills, and wild truths. A lot of writers have taken on rustbelt noir, the dying Ohio, but Soldan understands the place like no other. He’s come into his own with his latest book, a modern gut punch. He understands the graveyards of buildings. The promises lost in their shattered glass, and the whispers of lives long lost in the growing, brittle, grass that engulfs them. Soldan inhabits this rag-tag collection of characters that take you on a savage journey through the Undone Valley.”
—Frank Reardon, author of Nirvana Haymaker and Loud Love on the Sevens and Elevens
“William R. Soldan does what very few writers are able to do: he writes about ugly realities in a way that’s not just skillful, but brutally beautiful, leaving the reader breathless. Undone Valley is a blazing testament to that very fact.”
—Stephen J. Golds, author of Say Goodbye When I’m Gone and Always the Dead
“So much crime writing and Grit Lit seems bent on showing off just how tough and mean and lowdown it is. But William R. Soldan’s Undone Valley doesn’t need to show off. It comes by its grit naturally, with a flinty grace that permeates this beautiful, festering novel right up through its apocalyptic climax. When it comes to true grit, Soldan is the real deal.”
—Joey R. Poole, author of I Have Always Been Here Before
Order Dan Crawley's The Wind, It Swirls here!
THE WIND, IT SWIRLS
Dan Crawley
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8528309699
The flash fictions and longer works in Dan Crawley’s The Wind, It Swirls take us deep inside the strangeness of the domestic sphere, offering keen glimpses of his characters’ dreams and discoveries, the sudden violence that can sometimes erupt into a life, epiphanies that rattle open hearts and minds, the ambiguities that settle in like weather. These are stories of step-parents and spouses and exes and neighbors and co-workers and children. They are the strangers you see in grocery store parking lots arguing on the phone, or alone in backyards with a bottle of beer, or striding hurriedly across a college campus with a look on their face you can’t explain but somehow know spells trouble of an all-too-human kind. Moment after moment, these stories hold up a mirror.
~ Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry
The Wind, it Swirls is a gallery of story portraits of the people we might see all the time--a university lecturer, a kid on a bike, a woman on an ordinary drive. People we only think we know. But there is, as the title suggests, a wind swirling through the stories that lifts the façade and lets us in to see what’s hidden, and private, and oddly universal. Crawley has a sure eye when it comes to description, character, and story, and the result is a truly stunning collection, one you are sure to remember for a very long time.
~Francine Witte, author of Dressed All Wrong for This and The Way of the Wind
Dan Crawley’s debut short story collection, The Wind, It Swirls, is one of astonishing emotional observation and honesty. I am consistently struck by the power of the language and the quiet dramatic urgency inside these stories; the singularity of each human being he creates. Crawley’s grace as a storyteller is matched by his compassion to his characters. Every story in this stunning debut collection conjures a beautiful, heartbreaking world.
~Meg Pokrass, author of Spinning to Mars and The Loss Detector
This is a sharp and aching collection of stories that revel in the soft intimacies we so often hide, the light that comes through the cracks, the connections we find, despite.
~Robert James Russell, author of Mesilla and Sea of Trees
Dan Crawley is a Realist in the true American tradition. The Wind, It Swirls is a collection of thirty stories — thirty little vistas into what it is to be human. Crawley writes simply and truly to the heart of each piece and leaves the reader to make of it what they will. A brilliant evocation of people’s lives. He has an ability to distil down complex feelings in a simple yet profound way. Each and every story is a subtle yet moving pull on the emotions. An excellent collection - highly recommended.
~Peter Jordan, author of Calls to Distant Places
Crawley’s fiction, often short but relentless with surprising bursts of language and insight, is the moment the curtain rises and stage lights glare. There’s nothing self-conscious about the prose or characters who populate stories you’ll want to return to; these characters are us. Well-intentioned, desperate, and comical in their pursuit of a life well-lived. Crawley invites all readers to pull up a chair, to relax into the warm temperatures of his prose, to marvel at the tangle of misdeeds and charity; the heart a weapon and a salve in this necessary debut story collection.
~Tommy Dean, author of Special Like the People on TV and the forthcoming Covenants
THE WIND, IT SWIRLS
Dan Crawley
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8528309699
The flash fictions and longer works in Dan Crawley’s The Wind, It Swirls take us deep inside the strangeness of the domestic sphere, offering keen glimpses of his characters’ dreams and discoveries, the sudden violence that can sometimes erupt into a life, epiphanies that rattle open hearts and minds, the ambiguities that settle in like weather. These are stories of step-parents and spouses and exes and neighbors and co-workers and children. They are the strangers you see in grocery store parking lots arguing on the phone, or alone in backyards with a bottle of beer, or striding hurriedly across a college campus with a look on their face you can’t explain but somehow know spells trouble of an all-too-human kind. Moment after moment, these stories hold up a mirror.
~ Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry
The Wind, it Swirls is a gallery of story portraits of the people we might see all the time--a university lecturer, a kid on a bike, a woman on an ordinary drive. People we only think we know. But there is, as the title suggests, a wind swirling through the stories that lifts the façade and lets us in to see what’s hidden, and private, and oddly universal. Crawley has a sure eye when it comes to description, character, and story, and the result is a truly stunning collection, one you are sure to remember for a very long time.
~Francine Witte, author of Dressed All Wrong for This and The Way of the Wind
Dan Crawley’s debut short story collection, The Wind, It Swirls, is one of astonishing emotional observation and honesty. I am consistently struck by the power of the language and the quiet dramatic urgency inside these stories; the singularity of each human being he creates. Crawley’s grace as a storyteller is matched by his compassion to his characters. Every story in this stunning debut collection conjures a beautiful, heartbreaking world.
~Meg Pokrass, author of Spinning to Mars and The Loss Detector
This is a sharp and aching collection of stories that revel in the soft intimacies we so often hide, the light that comes through the cracks, the connections we find, despite.
~Robert James Russell, author of Mesilla and Sea of Trees
Dan Crawley is a Realist in the true American tradition. The Wind, It Swirls is a collection of thirty stories — thirty little vistas into what it is to be human. Crawley writes simply and truly to the heart of each piece and leaves the reader to make of it what they will. A brilliant evocation of people’s lives. He has an ability to distil down complex feelings in a simple yet profound way. Each and every story is a subtle yet moving pull on the emotions. An excellent collection - highly recommended.
~Peter Jordan, author of Calls to Distant Places
Crawley’s fiction, often short but relentless with surprising bursts of language and insight, is the moment the curtain rises and stage lights glare. There’s nothing self-conscious about the prose or characters who populate stories you’ll want to return to; these characters are us. Well-intentioned, desperate, and comical in their pursuit of a life well-lived. Crawley invites all readers to pull up a chair, to relax into the warm temperatures of his prose, to marvel at the tangle of misdeeds and charity; the heart a weapon and a salve in this necessary debut story collection.
~Tommy Dean, author of Special Like the People on TV and the forthcoming Covenants
Order Amanda Bales' Pekolah Stories here!
PEKOLAH STORIES
Amanda Bales
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8528302058
"Amanda Bales is the best kind of regional writer: she portrays the lives of rural, working class people without judgment, and she asks readers to look closely at these lives so that they may see something of themselves in these stories. These stories are raw, honest, and haunting. Amanda Bales is a writer we'd all do well to read, and a voice we'd all be wise to listen to." ~Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home
"Bales writes about a part of America we need to look at much more closely, and she does so with such compassion that her readers feel obligated to show that compassion too, usually for people—self-righteous vigilantes, victims and perpetrators of casual violence, every day charlatans and burned out dreamers—we try our best to ignore. Even the shortest of these pieces asks a lot of us, and then gives more in return. Difficult stories for difficult times, wonderfully rendered and open hearted." ~David Crouse, author of The Man Back There and Copy Cats
"Amanda Bales wasted no time staking her claim as a short story writer of extraordinary talent. Pekolah Stories is more than a debut. It is a collection that sings both beautifully and heartbreakingly, a book of stories as fantastic as any ever written." ~Sheldon Lee Compton, CJ author of Sway
"Amanda Bales’ Pekolah Stories reveal the desperation of rural communities eviscerated by economic collapse, steeped in an unforgiving, poisonous religion, and accustomed to everyday meanness and ravaged families. Children growing up in cultural swamps, in these stories and in real life, never recover. Many die of suicide or violence or drugs. Some go to prison, few go to college, and even the ones who appear to survive carry hidden wounds that threaten to drag them back down. Bales’ stories fearlessly trace the grasping tentacles of generational trauma, leaving readers to reckon with truths that land like a punch to the solar plexus." ~Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, Oklahoma Poet Laureate (2017-2020)
PEKOLAH STORIES
Amanda Bales
$13.99
ISBN: 979-8528302058
"Amanda Bales is the best kind of regional writer: she portrays the lives of rural, working class people without judgment, and she asks readers to look closely at these lives so that they may see something of themselves in these stories. These stories are raw, honest, and haunting. Amanda Bales is a writer we'd all do well to read, and a voice we'd all be wise to listen to." ~Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home
"Bales writes about a part of America we need to look at much more closely, and she does so with such compassion that her readers feel obligated to show that compassion too, usually for people—self-righteous vigilantes, victims and perpetrators of casual violence, every day charlatans and burned out dreamers—we try our best to ignore. Even the shortest of these pieces asks a lot of us, and then gives more in return. Difficult stories for difficult times, wonderfully rendered and open hearted." ~David Crouse, author of The Man Back There and Copy Cats
"Amanda Bales wasted no time staking her claim as a short story writer of extraordinary talent. Pekolah Stories is more than a debut. It is a collection that sings both beautifully and heartbreakingly, a book of stories as fantastic as any ever written." ~Sheldon Lee Compton, CJ author of Sway
"Amanda Bales’ Pekolah Stories reveal the desperation of rural communities eviscerated by economic collapse, steeped in an unforgiving, poisonous religion, and accustomed to everyday meanness and ravaged families. Children growing up in cultural swamps, in these stories and in real life, never recover. Many die of suicide or violence or drugs. Some go to prison, few go to college, and even the ones who appear to survive carry hidden wounds that threaten to drag them back down. Bales’ stories fearlessly trace the grasping tentacles of generational trauma, leaving readers to reckon with truths that land like a punch to the solar plexus." ~Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, Oklahoma Poet Laureate (2017-2020)
UPPERCUT
by Mark Rogers
ISNB: 979-8696477145
Format: Paperback
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
Uppercut is about 99er Rogers being laid off from his job in LA/NYC and having his unemployment run out. He ends up moving to Mexico to make a go of it. The book includes a harrowing episode where Rogers is detained by Homeland Security at the Tijuana border for 22 hours (with good reason) while staring down a 10-year sentence and $200K fine. But Rogers is determined to leave the U.S. for a better life in Mexico, while at the same time Mexicans are crossing the border into the U.S. for their own improved shot at life.
Mark Rogers is a writer and artist whose literary heroes include Charles Bukowski, Willy Vlautin and Charles Portis. He lives most of the year in Baja California, Mexico with his Sinaloa-born wife, Sophy. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice and other publications. His travel journalism, which regularly appears in USA Today, has brought him to 56 countries. These trips have provided plenty of inspiration for his novels and screenplays.
THE RED KNIFE PLAYS
by Adam Van Winkle
ISBN: 979-8562625038
Format: Paperback
Price: $9.99
Available Here!
Herein are three plays: The Mason Jar, an almost-tragedy in three acts adapted from Sheldon Lee Compton's novel Dysphoria; Rafting, a ten-minute play in supplement to The Mason Jar adapted from Sheldon Lee Compton's novel Dysphoria; and Sister Hall, a play about place in three acts adapted from various stories focusing on Sister Hall in Sheldon Lee Compton's collection Sway. Red Knife, Kentucky and thereabouts serves as the setting for all three. Dysphoria and Sway are both available from Cowboy Jamboree Press as well.
by Adam Van Winkle
ISBN: 979-8562625038
Format: Paperback
Price: $9.99
Available Here!
Herein are three plays: The Mason Jar, an almost-tragedy in three acts adapted from Sheldon Lee Compton's novel Dysphoria; Rafting, a ten-minute play in supplement to The Mason Jar adapted from Sheldon Lee Compton's novel Dysphoria; and Sister Hall, a play about place in three acts adapted from various stories focusing on Sister Hall in Sheldon Lee Compton's collection Sway. Red Knife, Kentucky and thereabouts serves as the setting for all three. Dysphoria and Sway are both available from Cowboy Jamboree Press as well.
TWO EUNICES
by Adam Van Winkle
ISBN: 979-8567271278
Format: Paperback
Price: $3.59
Available Here!
This is a nursing home play in three acts. Eunice Ward cannot speak. Eunice Riggs speaks well but everything she says is crazy. They used to be tag team partners and Lady Tag Team Champions of Texas. Now they are dying together. Flashbacks and the present reveal the rich, lascivious, deceitful lives of these former regional pro wrestlers, all come together in the Whitesboro Nursing Home. It can only end in an all out brawl.
by Adam Van Winkle
ISBN: 979-8567271278
Format: Paperback
Price: $3.59
Available Here!
This is a nursing home play in three acts. Eunice Ward cannot speak. Eunice Riggs speaks well but everything she says is crazy. They used to be tag team partners and Lady Tag Team Champions of Texas. Now they are dying together. Flashbacks and the present reveal the rich, lascivious, deceitful lives of these former regional pro wrestlers, all come together in the Whitesboro Nursing Home. It can only end in an all out brawl.
THE PATRON SAINT OF BIRDS
Stories by Steve Lambert
ISBN: 979-8687243100
Format Paperback
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
“What if every ‘Florida Man’ news story showed a complex, flesh-and-blood human? That’s what you get from Steve Lambert. The characters in The Patron Saint of Birds are by turns fierce and heartbreaking, and always captivating. Grab a beer from the cooler and wait out a hurricane among the trailer parks and orange groves of Sahwoklee County.” -Katie Burgess, editor of Emrys Journal and author of Wind on the Moon
"With his first book of fiction, The Patron Saint of Birds, Lambert proves himself worthy of a great American distinction: He is a true Southern Writer, and in all the best ways. Like Harry Crews and Flannery O'Connor before him, Lambert writes the working class with equal parts esteem, robust hilarity, and tempered rebuke. There can only be one explanation for the beauty and authenticity in these pages—Lambert has lived many a tired life. He knows the back roads better than he knows even the enduring tales of his Southern Gothic ancestors. This is a work of outstanding fiction, yes, but it is a true book in all the ways that matter."
-Matt Phillips, author of Know Me from Smoke and Countdown
“Steve Lambert has the best set of instincts I’ve seen from a writer in a long, long time. The stories in The Patron Saint of Birds move as naturally as Greek myth. Never before have I seen so clearly into the hearts of characters while also sensing the power and movement of revelation. This book should be anticipated, relished, and remembered.”
-Sheldon Lee Compton, author of Dysphoria
About the Author:
Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana and grew up in Florida. His fiction has appeared in Broad River Review, BULL Men’s Fiction, Emrys Journal, Madcap Review, Deep South Magazine, and many other places. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations and was a Rash Award in Fiction finalist. He won third-place in Glimmer Train Stories’ Very Short Fiction Award. Emrys Journal awarded his poetry with the Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize. He is the author of the poetry collection Heat Seekers and the chapbook In Eynsham. He lives in Northeast Florida, with his wife and daughter.
Stories by Steve Lambert
ISBN: 979-8687243100
Format Paperback
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
“What if every ‘Florida Man’ news story showed a complex, flesh-and-blood human? That’s what you get from Steve Lambert. The characters in The Patron Saint of Birds are by turns fierce and heartbreaking, and always captivating. Grab a beer from the cooler and wait out a hurricane among the trailer parks and orange groves of Sahwoklee County.” -Katie Burgess, editor of Emrys Journal and author of Wind on the Moon
"With his first book of fiction, The Patron Saint of Birds, Lambert proves himself worthy of a great American distinction: He is a true Southern Writer, and in all the best ways. Like Harry Crews and Flannery O'Connor before him, Lambert writes the working class with equal parts esteem, robust hilarity, and tempered rebuke. There can only be one explanation for the beauty and authenticity in these pages—Lambert has lived many a tired life. He knows the back roads better than he knows even the enduring tales of his Southern Gothic ancestors. This is a work of outstanding fiction, yes, but it is a true book in all the ways that matter."
-Matt Phillips, author of Know Me from Smoke and Countdown
“Steve Lambert has the best set of instincts I’ve seen from a writer in a long, long time. The stories in The Patron Saint of Birds move as naturally as Greek myth. Never before have I seen so clearly into the hearts of characters while also sensing the power and movement of revelation. This book should be anticipated, relished, and remembered.”
-Sheldon Lee Compton, author of Dysphoria
About the Author:
Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana and grew up in Florida. His fiction has appeared in Broad River Review, BULL Men’s Fiction, Emrys Journal, Madcap Review, Deep South Magazine, and many other places. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations and was a Rash Award in Fiction finalist. He won third-place in Glimmer Train Stories’ Very Short Fiction Award. Emrys Journal awarded his poetry with the Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize. He is the author of the poetry collection Heat Seekers and the chapbook In Eynsham. He lives in Northeast Florida, with his wife and daughter.
LOST IN THE FURROWS
Stories by William R. Soldan
ISBN: 979-8675099924
Format: Paperback
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
Lost in the Furrows is a vivid collection set in a variety of troubled landscapes, in which stories unfold in a wide range of lengths and forms. These are the stories of those both on the fringe and in the thick—isolated, desperate people scrambling toward unknown horizons from pasts that linger and won’t lie still. Populated with gritty, deeply flawed characters struggling to persevere, this is a book in which the dark facets of humanity are on full display. In its pages we find children resisting tradition, parents treading murky waters, and others caught in the throes of everyday catastrophe, from the mundane to the monumental. Some of these folks relentlessly fight to forge new fates, while others resign themselves to playing out scripts written without their say. But even those who manage to escape or succeed in mending their broken lives, in the end, are left wearing the scars.
About the Author:
William R. Soldan grew up in and around the Rust Belt city of Youngstown, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two children, and has worked as many things, including factory machinist, maintenance man, vacuum cleaner salesman, bouncer, personal trainer, and most recently, English instructor. He received his BA in English Literature and his MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in publications such as New World Writing, Thuglit, Jellyfish Review, Kentucky Review, Elm Leaves Journal, The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, and many others.
Stories by William R. Soldan
ISBN: 979-8675099924
Format: Paperback
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
Lost in the Furrows is a vivid collection set in a variety of troubled landscapes, in which stories unfold in a wide range of lengths and forms. These are the stories of those both on the fringe and in the thick—isolated, desperate people scrambling toward unknown horizons from pasts that linger and won’t lie still. Populated with gritty, deeply flawed characters struggling to persevere, this is a book in which the dark facets of humanity are on full display. In its pages we find children resisting tradition, parents treading murky waters, and others caught in the throes of everyday catastrophe, from the mundane to the monumental. Some of these folks relentlessly fight to forge new fates, while others resign themselves to playing out scripts written without their say. But even those who manage to escape or succeed in mending their broken lives, in the end, are left wearing the scars.
About the Author:
William R. Soldan grew up in and around the Rust Belt city of Youngstown, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two children, and has worked as many things, including factory machinist, maintenance man, vacuum cleaner salesman, bouncer, personal trainer, and most recently, English instructor. He received his BA in English Literature and his MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in publications such as New World Writing, Thuglit, Jellyfish Review, Kentucky Review, Elm Leaves Journal, The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, and many others.
SWAY
Stories by Sheldon Lee Compton
ISBN: 979-8639987762
Format: Paperback
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
A new story collection by Sheldon Lee Compton, the man David Joy has called "the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet." With previously published stories and some new unseen gems, these 30 tales slide beautifully into the Appalachian mythopoeia Compton has so masterfully crafted over the years. Part grit, part gothic, all dirty and beautiful.
THE LONG WAY HOME
by Michael Chin
ISBN: 979-8612782285
Format: Paperback
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
Grapplers and ghosts. A cowboy and a tigress. Devoted fans, family, lovers, and Andre the Giant’s bastard daughter. The Long Way Home explores stories from the world of professional wrestling that walk a razor’s edge between fact and fiction, the world we know and its underbelly. Featuring work originally published in Passages North, Shenandoah, Gravel, Cherry Tree, Miracle Monocle, and others, the collection approaches a world of violence with a sensitive, but incisive eye toward what makes us all human.
About the Author:
Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Georgia with his wife and son. He has two full-length short story collections coming in fall 2019: You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue from Duck Lake Books and Circus Folk from Hoot ‘n’ Waddle. He has also published three chapbooks: Autopsy and Everything After with The Florida Review, Distance Traveled with Bent Window Books, and The Leo Burke Finish with Gimmick Press. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE BEFORE
by Joey R. Poole
ISBN: 979-8603308982
Format: Paperback
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
Private detective Frank J. Smiley is a hellhound on the trail at Cedar Lawn mobile home park. The jaded host of cable TV’s Modern Day Monsters has seen his fair share of hoaxes, but the Lizard Woman of Okamassee County just may be the real thing. Things finally start looking up for Roosevelt Law after his wife sends him to kill a rattlesnake hiding in the church yard. The voices in a homeless woman’s head lead her into the shadow of death with vengeance in mind. Two reunited childhood friends learn the hard way that war is hell on the home front, too. In a not-too-distant alternate future, a factory worker grieving for his dead wife faces tough decisions when his son, a genetic engineering prodigy, finds a way to bring her back from the dead. These stories and the others in this debut collection evoke a gritty vision of a world in which all sorts of things, both wondrous and evil, just might be hiding in the shadows.
About the Author:
Joey Poole is a writer from South Carolina, where he lives with his wife and family. His short fiction has appeared in places like Bull, Molotov Cocktail Lit Zine, Southeast Review, Scintilla Press, Cowboy Jamboree, and Derelict, Vol. 1. I Have Always Been Here Before is his first collection. He is currently working on a novel, tentatively titled The Year of the Possum. Follow him on Twitter @JRichardPoole.
I'LL STILL BE HERE LONG AFTER YOU'RE GONE, STORIES by Daren Dean
ISBN: 978-1082020070
Format: Paperback (ebook avail 2020)
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
Set in the cities, towns, and hamlets all over the midwest and points south, his stories defy easy generalizations in tone, voice, and genre. Dean’s characters are often flawed, damaged, brutally real, which prompted Robert Olen Butler to write, “Dean writes like the laureate of fallen angels.” He lays bear his character’s often contrarian hearts on the page. In the title story, a boy learns to fight with his fists and cry with his heart. In “Faith Baby” an electrician is an addict’s salvation. In “Captain Marvel Goes Down in Gigolo Hall of Fame” a middle aged man searches for a sugar mama in a nursing home and gets more than he bargained for. In “Fever” the death of a child gauges the temperature of a marriage. Clyde Edgerton wrote, “His fiction . . . is just twisted enough to hold a reader tight.” These stories burn with rage, a fever-pitch hilarity, and often tragedy. His people are real and preoccupied with their relentless pursuit of imperfection just like the best of us.
About the Author
Daren Dean was born in Missouri, but also considers North Carolina and Louisiana home. He is the author of the novel Far Beyond the Pale. His new short story collection, I’ll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone is forthcoming from CJ Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Maryland Literary Review, BULL (Men's Fiction), Midwestern Gothic, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Fiction Southeast, StorySouth, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Currently, he serves as an Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing Specialist-Fiction) at Lincoln University of Missouri.
ISBN: 978-1082020070
Format: Paperback (ebook avail 2020)
Price: $13.99
Available Here!
Set in the cities, towns, and hamlets all over the midwest and points south, his stories defy easy generalizations in tone, voice, and genre. Dean’s characters are often flawed, damaged, brutally real, which prompted Robert Olen Butler to write, “Dean writes like the laureate of fallen angels.” He lays bear his character’s often contrarian hearts on the page. In the title story, a boy learns to fight with his fists and cry with his heart. In “Faith Baby” an electrician is an addict’s salvation. In “Captain Marvel Goes Down in Gigolo Hall of Fame” a middle aged man searches for a sugar mama in a nursing home and gets more than he bargained for. In “Fever” the death of a child gauges the temperature of a marriage. Clyde Edgerton wrote, “His fiction . . . is just twisted enough to hold a reader tight.” These stories burn with rage, a fever-pitch hilarity, and often tragedy. His people are real and preoccupied with their relentless pursuit of imperfection just like the best of us.
About the Author
Daren Dean was born in Missouri, but also considers North Carolina and Louisiana home. He is the author of the novel Far Beyond the Pale. His new short story collection, I’ll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone is forthcoming from CJ Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Maryland Literary Review, BULL (Men's Fiction), Midwestern Gothic, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Fiction Southeast, StorySouth, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Currently, he serves as an Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing Specialist-Fiction) at Lincoln University of Missouri.
INA-BABY, A LOVE STORY IN REVERSE by Benjamin Drevlow
ISBN: 978-1687713445
Format: Paperback (ebook in 2020)
Price: $13.99
Available here!
They're too broken not to find each other, he's too broken to make it out alive. Ina-Baby is a collection of linked love stories told in reverse order of mutual abuse. He's pathetically suicidal and she's a bit of a sadomasochist though not one to feel sorry or take shit from anybody, let alone a crybaby like him. What could've ever drawn them together in the first place? Well, it's kinda-sorta like they're star-crossed lovers if they weren't as completely effed in the head as they are, and as effed in the head as they are for each other. She’s got her whiskey and sweet red wine and he's got his SURGE!. She's a child of divorce, which is sad, but no real explanation, and he's got a list of childhood trauma that's too long to be believed (and history of histrionics), which he won't stop reliving on the page and in caffeinated temper tantrums. In the end, which is the beginning, he can't let go of the past, and she can't let go of the facts. It's unclear which is healthier everyone concerned--for two of them to stay together, for them to get as far away from each other as they can. But hey, it's a fun ride along the way (said no one who's ever been in an abusive relationship like this).
About the Author:
The Drevlow originates from the land of abandoned old barns and pine barrens of Northern Wisconsin and still stands as the only man in his family not to lose a finger to a farming accident. The author of the book Bend With the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father and the editor-in-chief of BULL LIT, the Drevlow has published short fiction and nonfiction in such mags as Literary Orphans, Pithead Chapel, and Gravel, among others. You can find these and other stories linked at thedrevlow-olsonshow.com and twitter.com/thedrevlow.
ISBN: 978-1687713445
Format: Paperback (ebook in 2020)
Price: $13.99
Available here!
They're too broken not to find each other, he's too broken to make it out alive. Ina-Baby is a collection of linked love stories told in reverse order of mutual abuse. He's pathetically suicidal and she's a bit of a sadomasochist though not one to feel sorry or take shit from anybody, let alone a crybaby like him. What could've ever drawn them together in the first place? Well, it's kinda-sorta like they're star-crossed lovers if they weren't as completely effed in the head as they are, and as effed in the head as they are for each other. She’s got her whiskey and sweet red wine and he's got his SURGE!. She's a child of divorce, which is sad, but no real explanation, and he's got a list of childhood trauma that's too long to be believed (and history of histrionics), which he won't stop reliving on the page and in caffeinated temper tantrums. In the end, which is the beginning, he can't let go of the past, and she can't let go of the facts. It's unclear which is healthier everyone concerned--for two of them to stay together, for them to get as far away from each other as they can. But hey, it's a fun ride along the way (said no one who's ever been in an abusive relationship like this).
About the Author:
The Drevlow originates from the land of abandoned old barns and pine barrens of Northern Wisconsin and still stands as the only man in his family not to lose a finger to a farming accident. The author of the book Bend With the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father and the editor-in-chief of BULL LIT, the Drevlow has published short fiction and nonfiction in such mags as Literary Orphans, Pithead Chapel, and Gravel, among others. You can find these and other stories linked at thedrevlow-olsonshow.com and twitter.com/thedrevlow.
HARDWAY JUICE by Adam Van Winkle
ISBN: 1099009863
Format: Paperback & eBook
Price: $9.99
Available Here
(eBook here)
A local wrestling legend comes home as the independent circuit swings through a small Texas town one Saturday night in the Fall of 1997 in this novella. Paul wants to go to the matches if he can get past his drunk stepdad. Lisa wants to leave town altogether but her dad is dying to take her to the show. A week of anxiety and hope and despair and debauchery follows the teens, townsfolk, wrestlers and all to the high school gymnasium where worlds collide and there can only be blood.
About the Author:
Adam Van Winkle is the author of Abraham Anyhow (Red Dirt Press, 2017) and While They were in the Field (Red Dirt Press, 2019) and his writing has appeared in places like Bull Men’s Fiction, Red Dirt Forum, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Southern Literary Review, Cheap Pop, Pithead Chapel, Monkey Bicycle, and Crack the Spine. In addition to writing and editing grit lit he writes on wrestling for TWM News UK. Find him @gritvanwinkle and www.adamvanwinkle.com.
ISBN: 1099009863
Format: Paperback & eBook
Price: $9.99
Available Here
(eBook here)
A local wrestling legend comes home as the independent circuit swings through a small Texas town one Saturday night in the Fall of 1997 in this novella. Paul wants to go to the matches if he can get past his drunk stepdad. Lisa wants to leave town altogether but her dad is dying to take her to the show. A week of anxiety and hope and despair and debauchery follows the teens, townsfolk, wrestlers and all to the high school gymnasium where worlds collide and there can only be blood.
About the Author:
Adam Van Winkle is the author of Abraham Anyhow (Red Dirt Press, 2017) and While They were in the Field (Red Dirt Press, 2019) and his writing has appeared in places like Bull Men’s Fiction, Red Dirt Forum, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Southern Literary Review, Cheap Pop, Pithead Chapel, Monkey Bicycle, and Crack the Spine. In addition to writing and editing grit lit he writes on wrestling for TWM News UK. Find him @gritvanwinkle and www.adamvanwinkle.com.
DYSPHORIA by Sheldon Lee Compton
ISBN: 978-1092736732
Format: Paperback & Ebook
Price: $9.99-13.99
Available Here
(Kindle ebook Here)
What can you save with a Mason jar? Money? A life? When Paul heads back to Red Knife, Kentucky for his father's funeral, his visit turns into an extended stay and a search for the people and places that made his dad so dysphoric about life. What he finds is years of tumult and abuse and shame, all centered on one day, long ago, and an accident at an abandoned mine tipple. The hauntings of the past become all too real for Paul, and, as he comes to grips with his father's death, his own life is endangered... A new Appalachian gothic from Sheldon Lee Compton, the man Donald Ray Pollock has called "a hillbilly Bukowski, one of the grittiest writers to come down the pike since Larry Brown."
About the Author:
Sheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer, novelist, and poet from Eastern Kentucky. He is the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012) and Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014) the novel Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016) and the poetry chapbook Podunk Lore, part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) His work has also been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, the Still: Journal Award and the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award.
ISBN: 978-1092736732
Format: Paperback & Ebook
Price: $9.99-13.99
Available Here
(Kindle ebook Here)
What can you save with a Mason jar? Money? A life? When Paul heads back to Red Knife, Kentucky for his father's funeral, his visit turns into an extended stay and a search for the people and places that made his dad so dysphoric about life. What he finds is years of tumult and abuse and shame, all centered on one day, long ago, and an accident at an abandoned mine tipple. The hauntings of the past become all too real for Paul, and, as he comes to grips with his father's death, his own life is endangered... A new Appalachian gothic from Sheldon Lee Compton, the man Donald Ray Pollock has called "a hillbilly Bukowski, one of the grittiest writers to come down the pike since Larry Brown."
About the Author:
Sheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer, novelist, and poet from Eastern Kentucky. He is the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012) and Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014) the novel Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016) and the poetry chapbook Podunk Lore, part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) His work has also been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, the Still: Journal Award and the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award.