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162 pgs. /// Feb. 2013
“The scope of the thing is just kind of flabbergasting: Kimball as a filter for all these people’s years. I can’t imagine anyone else capable of such an undertaking. ” – Blake Butler
“Delightful” – NPR, All Things Considered
“These postcards remind me of hagiography. It’s refreshing to see all lives celebrated and revered in the same way.” – Jen Michalski
“Audacious” – Little Patuxent Review
“It felt like being exposed, but also strangely satisfying…makes me feel happy when I read it.” – The Guardian
214 pgs. /// Nov. 2012
“In this amazing, collapsed-time text, I’m led along dark alleys of American history by an all-seeing voice-over narrative that reports on things from a great height and in an ultra-factual way. Familiar events of war, sorrow and struggle are seen anew, as if on a slide under a microscope.” – David Ohle
“In The Alligators of Abraham, Robert Kloss drops us into the darkness of the Civil War, showing a culture perpetually on the edge of extinction. Yet out of that murky world, hazed and fogged, rise the clear and distinct shapes of a people not ready to surrender to their own haunting. A novel as lyrical as it is precise in its depiction of the struggle to maintain dignity.” – Adam Braver
“Robert Kloss’s words gnaw into the collective-dark-underbelly-unconsciousness of the 19th century which, in many ways, we’ve never entirely gotten over in America. They get how the ‘you’ of America is both masculine and tender, how it’s powered by craziness and wounds, and how it longs to liberate and yet remains enslaving and enslaved. They understand how war roils in the guts. There is a terrible, terrible movie in which Shirley Temple meets Abraham Lincoln. This book is a gristly bloody opposite of that; it reeks of the truth. Thank you Robert Kloss.” – Rebecca Brown
155 pgs. /// Oct. 2012
“Back in 1996, Ken Sparling published a novel that was unlike any novel I had ever read before and I was amazed by what he had done. That novel was Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall. It’s years later now and I’m still amazed by the book every time I re-read it.” – Michael Kimball
“Ken Sparling’s 1996 classic might have been out of print for almost a decade and a half, but its virtuosities have hardly been forgotten and have hardly gone unloved to death. What a joy it is, though, to see this piercingly funny, nervous, and thrillingly sad novel-in-fragments available at last for a new generation of readers to discover its loopy domestic lyricism of the shifting lonelinesses and companionate spells at the heart of contemporary marriage. I envy anyone reading Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall for the first time.” – Gary Lutz
“When I first read it as a young writer, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall was my bible. I read it, reread it, and even read it to other people. It felt like a revelation, a master’s class in writing. It taught me it was still possible to create a kind of literature that was utterly new, and all these years later it still stands alone as a novel unlike any I’ve ever read. Dad Says rips the veil off our most private thoughts and gives voice to the feelings we spend most of our lives trying to repress or just plain ignore. With economy, tenderness, and great humor, Sparling not only lays to waste our notions about what a novel can be, but also what being in the world can be. This is a brutal book.” – Jonathan Goldstein
105 pgs. /// April 2012
“In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella. Written with an ingenuity and joy that call to mind Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, each chapter is a treasure: Here are beast of burden children, larval girls, subterranean daughters and choirs of sirens, combustible baby boys. I loved this book and want to recommend it to every human parent and child I know; if trees, rocks, and stars were literate, I would recommend it to them, too. ‘Where do babies come from?’ children ask their parents, and Cataclysm Baby has an alphabet of answers as beautiful and mysterious as that ancient question, while always posing its haunting corollary: ‘Where do they go?’” – Karen Russell
“Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.” – Lucy Corin
“The baby born as fur ball, the one who chews up its sibling in the womb, the amputated limbs, the child sacrifices, the girl untethered into the sky, the skewed biblical cadences and the mythic tropes, the continuous horror begot by parenthood and authority—Matt Bell’s collection of condensed narraticules, Cataclysm Baby, is Avant-Gothic at its most remarkable, unsettling, potent.” – Lance Olsen
“You can read Matt Bell’s apocalyptic abecedarium as a grotesque allegory of the devastations of parenthood, or as a grim realist extrapolation evoked by our crumbling world order. But these lovely, harrowing pieces do not float off into the Ideasphere; they remain tethered to the dusty, arid earth by their palpable nouns: baby, hair, teeth, womb, seed, porridge, hut, crib, bone, mouth, hatchet, shovel, flesh. Like The Red Cavalry Stories or The Age of Wire and String, Cataclysm Baby is both surreal and vividly concrete, as much a Feeling Experiment as a Thought Experiment. The trope of end time is always about revelation, and what is revealed here, among other things, is Bell’s brutal compassion.” – Chris Bachelder
71 pgs. /// Jan. 2012
“Many words have been written about the Oregon Trail computer game. It has been discussed in college classrooms, professional conferences, radio interviews, TV newscasts, and Internet blogs. But now comes this – Gregory Sherl’s provocative book of poetry. Not a book about the Oregon Trail game, but one in which the game provides the metaphors for expressions of contemplation, disappointment, pain, and passion. I own a T-shirt that proclaims, You have died of dysentery. Sherl’s poetry goes deeper: My wagon is a carcass of remorse. I ford the river alone. Lovers of the game will delight in the many references from long ago computer screens. Lovers of life will unearth emotions from deep within their own history.” – Don Rawitsch (Oregon Trail game co-creator)
“Gregory Sherl writes the poetry of want, of “waiting to stop waiting” even as we’re fording the Kansas River. He makes oxen moan, kills us with dysentery, kisses our “floppy disk lips” and then wakes the dead. The Oregon Trail is The Oregon Trail, but it is also a modern prayer, a prescription for Xanax and a Chinese restaurant that makes you vomit. How did we get so lonely America? The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail is all the love we’ve ever had and all the love no one has ever had. This book is a fever.” – Melissa Broder
“Americana to the boot, the oxen pulling through the deserts of our imagination, chewing ghosts in the grass. Gregory Sherl has mined the world before the seven billionth child arrived, a world where a pasture and a wagon were the journey, not the tourist destination. This is not a museum, it’s a channel to the heart of the problem of how greed and comfort left the real life behind. It’s my pleasure to tell you that you need to read this book! Carve your note in the oxen’s side.” – CAConrad
100 pgs. /// Nov. 2011
Stamp Stories are texts of 50 words or less, printed on 1×1 cardstock, & shipped free from participating presses. We wanted to tie together the indie press community in a vibrant yet viable way, & so this venture was born. Through 2010, we solicited stamp-sized texts from 100 authors & distributed the physical Stamp Stories through more than 40 participating presses. [ C. ] collects all of these texts into one perfect-bound edition.
Participating Authors: James Tadd Adcox, Jesse Ball, Ken Baumann, Lauren Becker, Matt Bell, Kate Bernheimer, Michael Bible, Jack Boettcher, Harold Bowes, Jesse Bradley, Donald Breckenridge, Melissa Broder, Blake Butler, James Chapman, Jimmy Chen, Joshua Cohen, Peter Conners, Shome Dasgupta, Andy Devine, Giancarlo DiTrapano, Claire Donato, Elizabeth Ellen, Raymond Federman, Kathy Fish, Scott Garson, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Steven Gillis, Rachel B. Glaser, Amanda Goldblatt, Barry Graham, Amelia Gray, Sara Greenslit, Tina May Hall, Christopher Higgs, Lily Hoang, Tim Horvath, Joanna Howard, Laird Hunt, Jamie Iredell, Harold Jaffe, A D Jameson, Jac Jemc, Stephanie Johnson, Shane Jones, Drew Kalbach, Roy Kesey, Sean Kilpatrick, Michael Kimball, M. Kitchell, Robert Kloss, Darby Larson, Charles Lennox, Eugene Lim, Matthew Lippman, Norman Lock, Robert Lopez, Sean Lovelace, Josh Maday, Dave Madden, John Madera, Kendra Grant Malone, Tony Mancus, Peter Markus, Chelsea Martin, Zachary Mason, Hosho McCreesh, Alissa Nutting, Riley Michael Parker, Aimee Parkison, David Peak, Ted Pelton, Adam Peterson, Ryan Ridge, Joseph Riippi, Adam Robinson, Ethel Rohan, Joanna Ruocco, Kevin Sampsell, Selah Saterstrom, Davis Schneiderman, Zachary Schomburg, Todd Seabrook, Ben Segal, Gregory Sherl, Lydia Ship, Matthew Simmons, Justin Sirois, Amber Sparks, Ken Sparling, Ben Spivey, Michael Stewart, Terese Svoboda, Sean Ulman, Deb Olin Unferth, Timmy Waldron, William Walsh, Rupert Wondolowski, James Yeh, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé.
Participating Presses: Artifice Magazine, Artistically Declined Press, Atticus Books, Barge, Blood Pudding Press, Blue Square Books, Calamari Press, Cow Heavy, The Cupboard, Dark Sky Books, Dzanc Books, Ellipsis Press, Fairy Tale Review, Featherproof Books, Gigantic, Greying Ghost, Hobart, The Iron Rail, Ink Monkey Mag, Keyhole Books, Kitty Snacks, Lazy Fascist Press, Magic Helicopter Press, Monkeybicycle, Narrow House, Opium, Outside Writer’s Collective, Pank, Paper Hero Press, Pear Noir!, Pilot Books, Publishing Genius Press, Quick Fiction, Ravenna Books, Scrambler Books, Starcherone Books, Typecast Publishing, Tyrant Books, Word Riot Press, Yes Yes Books
67 pgs. /// July 2011
“In this joyful critique of a Randian, post-industrial society, Mathias Svalina comments on both the compulsive desire to make the inconsumable & the often intangible recalcitrance of our attempts to create something useful in a world increasingly characterized by a manufactured sense of lack, anomie & disaffection, where we are daily beset by ‘a kind of numbness, a shadow of desire or fear offset against a blank world.’ Svalina refuses this numbness & offers something else, something completely stunning, in its place.” – Gabriel Gudding
“This is a subversive & necessary book: the quixotic entrepreneurial spirit of individualist American capitalism is revealed as an inherently poetic construct, one that rests on theater, liminality, imaginative drive, contradiction, & failure. I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur is poignant & brilliant; it’s worth the investment.” – Christian Hawkey
82 pgs. /// April 2011
“In The Hieroglyphics, a novel(la) in prose poems, Michael Stewart tackles nothing less than a radical revision of creation myths that comments darkly on the ancient stories we have received & the future we may be facing. Stewart’s language is spare & haunting, the allusions resonating, in this work that reminds us how pale are the achievements of men.” – Wendy Barker
“A more certain world does not make for a less terrifying one in Michael Stewart’s astonishing & grave book of wisdoms & codes & laws & rites & rituals & charms. Gather: A sparrow is burning. Gather: There is news of the soul.” – Carole Maso
88 pgs. /// Jan. 2011
“This is book as turbulence disrupting the smooth sea, as anti-matter breaking bonds that had never before been broken. Throughout, the book defies the physics and metaphysics of our known world even as it pretends to a reaching backward, to drawing forth these tales from some shared past, dissembling not to deceive but to aggress us anew. See the quotation marks which suggest some unavailable subtext but which quote nothing but Lock’s own imagination, or else that of his arranging characters, his possible narrator, and you see the layers of interpretation he is willing to risk so as to prevent any easy explanation, any trite truth too cleverly left unconcealed. Better always that the work be mysterious, that the mystery be allowed to work upon us.” – Matt Bell
“Norman Lock’s Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast & dirty, wasting no time in lunging at your throat…Grim Tales is populated end to end with the magical & the bizarre: shape-shifting, witchery, underwater cities, indoor rain, beds that contain oceans, murderous objects, all manner of disappearance. Men lose their faces to mirrors, women are smothered by their hair, clouds settle over cities & suck them up…& in the midst of all this looming, Lock has an incredible ability to render compelling imagery & demeanor in minute, super-compressed bursts. Single lines resound in the mind. In the same way that it’s hard to stop staring at the internet’s seemingly endless array of weird memes & video databases, Lock’s words are both engrossing & slightly haunted. One could spend forever worming through these magicked words, their worlds.” – Blake Butler
89 pgs. /// June 2010
“My advice: those who are to read Sasha Fletcher’s delightful enjoinder When All Our Days Are Numbered should go into an empty house of an afternoon, shut themselves in a backroom closet on a low shelf, & read straight through without stopping.” – Jesse Ball
“Fletcher belongs to a new generation of writers who dare to risk language & imagination in equal measure. Every sharp line cuts & curls & the result is a world both familiar & exotic. This novella is part concept album, part epic poem, part twisted fable. A dream & a flood.” – Robert Lopez
“Sasha Fletcher, with his dream catastrophes & immense loves, can wand us into a new world. Here is a story that glistens.” – Deb Olin Unferth
156 pgs. /// June 2010
“An Island of Fifty is a new literary bomb, resulting in the shrapnel of gold, ships, ocean, chandeliers, dreams, blood, & flame. Old & stale literature won’t know what just hit. This is something new masking itself in the old & I’m so so so excited.” – Shane Jones
“Ben Brooks is popping quarks with An Island of Fifty, spilling new flavors of literature on the swampy bookstacks of old. Call it new political, new ecological, new sociological, new poetic activism, or even new imaginary creationism. This book builds up to tear down & tears down to build up. Desire as melancholia, progress as slippage, & wanting for wanting’s sake. The floodgates crumble. I relish the shape of this new wordspace, the play of noise & whisper, the unfamiliar voices, & the ache of nihilism paradoxically juxtaposed with the gleam of hopeful invention.” – Christopher Higgs
298 pgs. /// Jan. 2010
[ First Year ] collects all forty-three of the texts originally published in our chapbook series during 2008 & 2009, including work by Ken Baumann, Shane Jones, Jimmy Chen, Brandi Wells, Blake Butler, Nick Antosca, Sam Pink, James Chapman, Colin Bassett, Michael Kimball, Jac Jemc, Kim Chinquee, Kim Parko, Norman Lock, Randall Brown, Brian Evenson, Michael Stewart, Peter Markus, Ken Sparling, Aaron Burch, David Ohle, Matthew Savoca, P. H. Madore, Johannes Göransson, Charles Lennox, Ryan Call, Elizabeth Ellen, Molly Gaudry, Kevin Wilson, Mary Hamilton, Craig Davis, Kendra Grant Malone, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Hoang, Mark Baumer, Ben Tanzer, Krammer Abrahams, Joshua Cohen, Eugene Lim, C. L. Bledsoe, Joanna Ruocco, Josh Maday, & Michael Martone.
118 pgs. /// Jan. 2010
“There is no more perfect place to be than in Molly Gaudry’s tender, dirt-floored novel(la), We Take Me Apart. Oh cabbage leaves, oh roses, oh orange-slice childhood grins: this book broke my heart. Its sad memory-tropes come from fairy tales & childhood books. With language, Gaudry is as loving & careful as one is with a matchbook . . . when wishing to set the whole world on fire.” – Kate Bernheimer
“Molly Gaudry’s debut evokes the spirit of iconic fairy tales that have transported readers for centuries. Her variations on these themes delineate the psychological journey from girlhood to womanhood. But We Take Me Apart is more than a retelling. In it, Gaudry reconstitutes the essence of what makes fairy tales compelling, & she does so imaginatively & with great attention to language, the earmarks of poetry.” – Christopher Kennedy
