NOVELS

 

DRAG THE DARKNESS DOWN
By Matt Baker

Odom Shiloh is in trouble. His job is going nowhere, his marriage is on the ropes, and running over a French cyclist in Memphis didn't help. Now his sister, the piano virtuoso Birdshit, has run off with a local high school football star. Enter Blakey Flake, an art history teacher and armchair philosopher turned private investigator: off they go in search of Birdshit, encountering evangelical preachers, articulate foreigners, drug addicts in Superman underwear and, of course, the cops. But as the pair wind their way from Arkansas to Kansas City one cigarette at a time, Odom realizes that he isn't really running after Birdshit; he's actually running away from his past.

Matt Baker was born in Indiana and raised in Kansas. He attended the University of Arkansas and the Players Workshop of the Second City. He won the Trailridge Middle School Fastest Typist Award in the eighth grade. His work has not been translated into any languages. He lives in Little Rock.

 

78 STORIES: A CROSSWORD NOVELLA
By Ben Segal

As the price of oil skyrockets to heaven, NASA flights plummet back to earth, contemporary philosophy runs on dualistic fumes and the National Football League all but forbids end zone dance fiestas, you decided that humanity was officially out of good ideas. But you were thinking in terms of "left" and "right." 78 Stories, unlike the vast majority of the Western hemisphere's chirographic offerings, conceived of the world in terms of "across" and "down." Challenging our core assumptions of textual linearity while tickling our funny bones, Ben Segal's astonishingly original debut pirouettes from the Mayan Long Count, ghost/human romances, seedy Native American hotels, pie-creamed art critics, bears transfixed by cellular phone ringers, and much more. As in an American crossword puzzle, the text is readable in two directions.

Ben Segal is slight of build and wears a beard. He lives in Northamption, Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in several publications, but 78 Stories is his first book. He's not sure you can call it a book, but will persist in doing so. He can be contacted at benbensegal@gmail.com.

 

ICON
By Carl James Grindley

This is the way the world ends. Three interlocked novels explore a landscape that stretches from the Pacific Northwest to the Nowhere Place. An art appraiser's trip through a haunted mansion is derailed by a death ray. A 14th-century Italian scion dies brokenhearted and spends eternity keeping tabs on every single suicide on earth. A Mesoamerican Jaguar God unveils a vision of Yankee Stadium as a post-apocalyptic tomb, then hands a pair of Gutenberg bibles to the scene's horrified witness. Through its 575 pages, Icon proves to be more than a dark, sensitive and sweeping investigation of memory's inherent violence and implied oblivion; it may also prove to be the most unusual work of fiction you will ever read.

Born to working-class parents in the land of endless rain, Carl James Grindley flunked out of community college to impress a faithless girlfriend, hung out with 1% bikers in graduate school, and taught divinity at Yale. A disheartened member of the Canadian diaspora, Grindley, the last pure Gen-X'er, lives in New Haven.

 

NONE OF THAT WILL DO. NOW WHAT?
By Miles Newbold Clark

It's Wednesday. Dora's cooked the pork as usual, but Hugo is still standing on the porch, staring down the line of reasoning that led him up this sloped street plotted with McMansion chimneys craning from the desert floor to stab a smog-blazed sunset where police helicopters hmm, patiently, like puritan adaptations of a dragon. But Dora's had enough - and storms into the night - leaving Hugo to wander out in search of her, through a town whose streets have slowly become gridlocked by anxiety, bitterness, self-delusion, and death.

Homeschooled until the age of 16, Miles Newbold Clark has wandered through four colleges and two dozen jobs in North America, Europe and Asia. None of That Will Do. Now What? was written over a three-day period in Kyoto, Japan. He is currently studying law at Cornell University.

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