To order books please use our Paypal system or send a check or money order (made out to Kevin Sampsell please) to our address. ONE dollar per book will be added for shipping on books. Future Tense titles are also available through Amazon.com and Powells.com. Please e-mail us if you have any questions. Bookstores can order from Small Press Distribution, directly from us, and sometimes through Ingram.

Future Tense Books
PO Box 42416
Portland, OR 97242

Check out our new ebook imprint, Instant Future -- our debut titles, Altitude Sickness, by Litsa Dremousis and Being by Zach Ellis are available now!

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NEW TO OUR SCOUT BOOK SERIES
PRE-ORDER NOW

The Scout Book Series
Soft Split by Szilvia Molnar
$5, 32 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-76-8

Soft Split is a dark tale about love, betrayal, dreaming, sex, airports, and office tension. Szilvia Molnar is a fearless fictional deviant.

"With its red parrots, illicit sexual encounters, and a former lover named Blondie, Szilvia Molnar's Soft Split is a welcome contribution to the library of dreams, wet and not."

— Sjón, author of The Blue Fox

"If Georges Bataille had found a feral child and left her with Miranda July and Emmanuel Carrère to raise, the little girl may have have grown up to sound exactly like Szilvia Molnar, whose Soft Split has the mannered depravity and whimsical uber-feminist pervdom we’ve come to expect from these giants of the genre."

— Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight




AVAILABLE NOW!

Witchita Stories
By Troy James Weaver

PAPERBACK: $12
ISBN 978-1-892061-73-7

LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER (99 copies): $20
ISBN 978-1-892061-74-4




The short vignette-style tales in Troy James Weaver's literary debut, Witchita Stories, combine to make an evocative brew of small town melancholy, working class gloom, and coming of age charm. Told through the eyes of a young man who yearns to find excitement, truth, and a deeper family bond in his life, Weaver's approachable and revealing stories, lists, fragments, and memories delve into the weird, funny, and sometimes unsettling world of a midwest kid finding his own path.

"Thank god you can come across a writer like Troy James Weaver. In the future people will just say these stories are like Troy James Weaver stories and you'll know exactly what they mean." --Scott McClanahan

"There are moments, reading Witchita Stories, where everything dropped away, and I was speechless, or at least whatever the equivalent of speechless is when you're not talking in the first place. There is a deep sadness to these stories, and humor, but most importantly, honesty. This feels real and heavy and it's just about the best thing I've read in a long time." --J. David Osborne
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Excavation: A Memoir
By Wendy C. Ortiz

PAPERBACK: $15 -- INCLUDES SHIPPING!
242 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-70-6

LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER (99 COPIES): $28 -- INCLUDES SHIPPING!
242 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-48-5

Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher—now a registered sex offender—continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been just five years long, but would imprint itself on her and her later relationships, queer and straight, for the rest of her life.

In Excavation: A Memoir, the black and white of the standard victim/perpetrator stereotype gives way to unsettling grays. The present-day narrator reflects on the girl she once was, as well as the teacher and parent she has become. It's a beautifully written and powerful story of a woman reclaiming her whole heart.
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THE THREE NEW BOOKS IN OUR SCOUT BOOK SERIES
NOW OUT!

The Scout Book Series
Darkmouth Strikes Again by Jay Ponteri
$5, 32 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-69-0

Darkmouth Strikes Again is a lyric essay about metaphors, the self, family, death, language, and art. It speaks to the unspoken, speaks what we think but are too afraid to say aloud. Darkmouth attempts to understand sadness while poking breathing holes in it too. If sadness moves inside of us in dark fluent waves, Darkmouth attempts (& fails beautifully) to ride them, to rise above them, to keep from sinking beneath. It feels and sings like an epic poem. Jay Ponteri is the author of Wedlocked (Hawthorne Books, 2013), winner of the Oregon Book Award for creative nonfiction. He has recently published prose in Ghost Proposal, Forklift, Ohio, and Tin House. He teaches at Marylhurst University where he directs the undergraduate writing program and Show:Tell, The Workshop for Teen Writers & Artists.






The Scout Book Series
Girly by May-Lan Tan
$5, 32 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-68-3

May-Lan Tan's first published story appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story in 2011, and her long-anticipated debut collection, Things to Make and Break (CB Editions), is poised to become a cult hit. The Guardian described it as "excellent . . . these strange, flinty, cigarette-stained narratives speed by, offering lots of surface tension and compelling deeper passions." Her US debut, Girly, presents two brand-new stories of young women plotting their escape from childhood. Both are Hong Kong schoolgirls, one destined to cross the ocean while the other daydreams about the airplanes that fly directly over her home. May-Lan Tan's stories have appeared also in Areté, The Reader, and Spork. She lives in London.






The Scout Book Series
Pity the Animal by Chelsea Hodson
$5, 32 pages - (SOLD OUT)
ISBN 978-1-892061-67-6

Pity the Animal, an essay by Chelsea Hodson, explores the concept of human submission and commodification by way of window displays, wild animals, performance art, and sugar daddy dating websites. "How much can a body endure? Almost everything." Chelsea Hodson is a 2012 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. She is also the author of the chapbook Beach Camp, published by Swill Children in 2010. Her essays have been published in Black Warrior Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Sex Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Watch the trailer here: http://vimeo.com/88997155



NEW!

I Was A Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac
By Jamie Iredell

PAPERBACK: $12 -- INCLUDES SHIPPING!
200 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-46-1

LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER (99 COPIES): $25 -- INCLUDES SHIPPING!
200 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-47-8

After two full-length collections of fiction that mixed his irreverent treatment of form and gritty real-life candor (The Book of Freaks, Prose. Poems. A Novel.), Jamie Iredell delivers an assured and honest collection of personal essays. I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac reveals a writer who takes on his (literal) highs and (existential) lows with the unembellished voice of an anthropologist. Erudite, funny, and fearless, Iredell dives into subjects like drugs, alcoholism, body image, racism, feminism, and religion, and shines a light on some of the darkest moments of life. The essays are personal, confessional, and ultimately full of hope.

“Jamie Iredell is one of the two or three best writers I know in this world. If you read him—you’ll say the same thing. If you don’t, that’s fine. Your grandchildren will say it one day.” —Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia
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AVAILABLE NOW!

Partial List of People to Bleach
By Gary Lutz

(Expanded 2013 paperback edition) PAPERBACK: $12 + $1 shipping
116 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-44-7

LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION (99 COPIES): $25 + $1 shipping
116 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-45-4

Even as a chapbook, it was one of Time Out New York’s Ten Best Books of 2007, and now we're proud to publish an expanded paperback edition of Partial List of People to Bleach, with six previously uncollected pieces, including the provocative and now-classic essay “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” and a foreword by Gordon Lish.

  "Partial List of People to Bleach is at once cruelly honest, precisely painful, and beautifully rendered." —Brian Evenson "Gary Lutz is a master—living proof that, even in our cliché-ridden, denial-drenched, hype-driven age, true originality is still an American possibility." —George Saunders
PAPERBACK:


HARDCOVER




ORDER THE FIRST THREE BOOKS IN OUR SCOUT BOOK SERIES!
(And hey--no shipping charge)

The Scout Book Series
Presidents (And Other Jokes) by Sommer Browning
$5, 32 pages - (SOLD OUT)
ISBN 978-1-892061-63-8

A collection of jokes and cartoons that showcase the acerbic wit and an acute sense of the absurd from the Denver poet and author of Either Way I'm Celebrating [Birds, LLC]





The Scout Book Series
Dream Journals: When I Was Nineteen, I Was an Old Man by Melody Owen
SOLD OUT, 32 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-62-1

A selection from Melody's actual dream journals mixed with atmospheric collages from the acclaimed Portland artist, who is represented nationally by Elizabeth Leach Gallery






The Scout Book Series
A Secondary Landscape by Aaron Gilbreath
SOLD OUT, 32 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-61-4

Inspired by his belief that nature and mysticism held the secrets to life, Aaron Gilbreath went on a mind-expanding road trip with his best friend at age twenty. Listening to psychedelic music, bushwhacking off-trail, and downing everything from mushrooms to PCP, the people they met and the roads ahead of them blurred into a new sort of reality. A secondary landscape. Aaron Gilbreath has written for The New York Times, Tin House, Oxford American, Yeti, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Brick, Virginia Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, AGNI and The Awl. He sells tea in Portland, Oregon and lives online at http://aarongilbreath.wordpress.com/






Legs Get Led Astray
By Chloe Caldwell

SOLD OUT 168 pages
ISBN: 978-1-892061-42-3

Legs Get Led Astray is a provocative collection of essays that vividly rockets the reader through one young woman's life. Chloe Caldwell beautifully and bluntly escorts you through her childhood dreams, her first loves, her most unguarded sexual exploits, bookstore crushes, babysitting jobs, heartbroken wanderlust, and the suicide of a lost lover. Caldwell's writing remarkably explores the genre of personal non-fiction and has been featured in The Rumpus, The Faster Times, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, The Nervous Breakdown, and Everyday Genius.


"Chloe Caldwell's Legs Get Led Astray is a scorching hot glitter box of youthful despair and dark delight. Tender and sharp, wide-eyed and searching, these essays have a reckless beauty that feels to me like magic." --Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, Torch, and Tiny Beautiful Things

"Prepare to shed skin. Chloe Caldwell's essays will dare you to dissect your own life. Shot-through with sexuality and sass, her language will get up in you and turn you inside out in the best possible way." --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

"These true stories are raw and heartfelt... gems galore." --Poe Ballantine, author of Things I Like About America








I Remember
By Shane Allison

$11, 110 pages
ISBN: 978-1-892061-41-6

Inspired by the underground classic, I Remember by Joe Brainard, Shane Allison takes us on a fragmented, lustful, and poetic tour of his life, from a turbulent childhood in Florida to his life in New York City. Allison's book is an epic poem/memoir full of frozen moments that capture a sexual, cultural, and emotional coming of age.

"Shane Allison taps directly into memory, like a faucet pushed into a maple tree to procure the sweet syrup. Sexy things, embarrassing things, the ugly and the fraught, the things of the child and the things of the man, all pour out in profusion. His testimony--of bullying, racism, and casual homophobia, but also the best rimjob he ever had--has the power to dismantle centuries of chains, the crippling superego." --Kevin Killian

Shane Allison has published stories and poems in countless magazines and journals. He has also edited numerous anthologies of queer writing and is the author of the collections, Black Fag (Future Tense Books, 2004, out of print), I Want to Eat Chinese Food Off Your Ass (Propaganda Press, 2008), and Slut Machine (Rebel Satori Press, 2011).

Get the e-book here!






Wish You Were Me
by Myriam Gurba
$5 (plus $1 shipping), 48 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-40-9

Wish You Were Me is Myriam Gurba's bizarre and uproarious follow-up to her award-winning first novella and story collection, Dahlia Season. There are some weird and unexplored thought patterns happening here. Gurba is a fierce pioneer in the gooey guts of our emotional and sexual zeitgeist.

"Myriam Gurba just blows me away. Her wit, her perversion, her sharp female smarts, her total fearlessness. I gasp and I gasp as I read her work because I can't believe she said that! It's not shocking, it's a relief. Okay it's a little bit shocking, too. All the best writing makes you come undone a little and Myriam is not afraid to stick her fingernails into your psyche and pull." --Michelle Tea

"Wish You Were Me is funny. Achingly funny. Uncomfortably funny, and that's the best kind of funny. It's the kind of humor you'll never forget and it's the kind of book you'll find necessary to subject your friends to." --Mary Van Note

Myriam Gurba lives in Long Beach, California and is the author of Dahlia Season (Future Tense/Manic D Press), which won the Edmund White Award for debut fiction. She has toured and performed with Sister Spit and her writing has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as make/shift and Garage.

Get the e-book here!




The Book of Freaks
by Jamie Iredell
$12.00, 136 pages
ISBN 978-1-892061-39-3

Or buy the e-book!

Like an expanded Dictionary of Received Ideas, The Book of Freaks takes its subject matter from everyday life. Both hilarious and poker-faced in equal measures, this faux encyclopedia categorizes mundanities and renders them starkly unexpected. From circus freaks, to nationalities, to you and everyone you've ever met, The Book of Freaks points out what we already knew, but never acknowledged: every one of us, in our own little ways, is a weirdo. The Book of Freaks is bewildering in a good way--a bluntly informational yet oddly poetic tour de force.

"Jamie Iredell can spin around with a disc in his hand and then throw that disc incredible distances. He can also do freakish things with words." --Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody

Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His writing has been published enthusiastically and reluctantly in various known and unknown forums. He also wrote a book called Prose. Poems. A Novel. which is very hard to find.




Ventriloquism
By Prathna Lor

$5.00 (plus $1 shipping), 48 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-38-6
Or buy the e-book!

Ventriloquism is the long-awaited print debut of this mysterious young Canadian author.

Lor's quick stories are both darkly funny and emotionally unsettling, with a style that focuses heavily on amazing sentences and sexually ambiguous undertones.

Read more about Prathna at his web site and check out his previous e-book, Safe Toilet Syndrome.

"Lor takes the L from Lutz (Gary) and the L from Lydia (Davis) and adds an either-or of elegantly psychotic desire. Imagine Hannibal Lecter talking to the moon. Imagine a man in a suit petting a whale carcass. Prathna Lor puts his hand up in these voices and makes us remember every way a mouth can move." --Mike Young, author of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough

These hilariously original crazings and sorceries of language and of feeling let us in, at last, on all the secrets we've been keeping from ourselves. Prathna Lor is a dazzler. --Gary Lutz, author of Stories In the Worst Way

"Somehow objects get Prathna Lor to talk for them. When he was visited by a screen protector, and witchcraft, and Israel, he knew what to make them say, and they knew how to make him say it. Where I live I am visited by many floating images, but none of them are a king lowering himself onto a cock. So I am glad I have Ventriloquism here, and that it talks." --Evelyn Hampton, author of We Were Eternal and Gigantic






OK, Goodnight

By Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg

$5.00 (plus $1 shipping), 32 pages ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-37-9

Or buy the e-book!

Some people say the first Schomburg/Frey poems appeared during biblical times and that they were read with great joy on Noah's ark. Other folks date the appearance of these poets' duets at around 1978 or 2008. Regardless of their unknown origins, the haunting power, spare lines, and peculiar push and pull of these short poems add up to a satisfying and surprising reading experience. (This book comes with different colored covers. The first 100 copies use the color combos seen here)

Emily Kendal Frey is the author of Airport and a teacher. Zachary Schomburg is the author of Scary, No Scary and The Man Suit, and the co-publisher of Octopus Books. They also wrote the book, Team Sad (Cinematheque Press).




Put Your Head In My Lap
By Claudia Smith

$5.00 (plus $1 shipping), 44 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-32-6
From Claudia Smith, the award-winning author of 'The Sky Is a Well,' comes a new collection full of emotionally taut and sweetly melancholic stories that evoke the pain of lost love and broken families.
Claudia Smith lives and teaches in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

"Claudia Smith's 'Put Your Head In My Lap' is a vivid book of short fiction that both inspires me and makes me feel inadequate. She takes the everyday--cooking dinner, a stained sink, physical attraction--and renders them in such precise detail, that even "a collection of soiled fingernails in a shot glass" becomes almost unbearably beautiful." --Mary Miller, author of Big World

"For years I've been finding these little Claudia Smith stories. They draw me in so easily, with something familiar if slightly odd, and before I know it I'm consumed by a world far deeper than so few lines have any right to contain. In 'Put Your Head In My Lap,' each of the stories is anxious, intimate, and powerful. Yet together they form a narrative of love and separation--like a flash novel. She's a terrific writer." ---Robert Shapard, co-editor of the Sudden Fiction anthologies




Everything Was Fine Until Whatever
By Chelsea Martin

$11.00 (plus $1 shipping), 128 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-35-5

Anything is possible in Chelsea Martin's bizarre and endearingly honest collection of stories, lists, flash fictions, and revealing factoids. Everything Was Fine Until Whatever is a poker-faced and unpredictably comic tour de force. Festooned with artwork and hand-written notes, this is a grand debut by a magical new talent. Check out her own web site for extra goodness.

"Chelsea Martin offers a quirky blend of absurd erudition, hard-eyed candor, unexpected sentiment, tiny subliminal footnotes, and loopy artwork. The illustration alone for her "to do" list is worth the price of the book. Plus she's insane." -Mike Topp, author of Shorts Are Wrong

"Chelsea Martin's shapeshifting debut is not only wonderful and wacko, but, goddamn,something honest, something new." - Blake Butler, author of Ever.

Read an interview with Chelsea.




Embrace Your Insignificance: Lessons Learned Teaching English in Japan
By Bob Gaulke

$11.00 (plus $1 shipping), 124 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-34-1
ISBN-10: 1-892061-34-8

Bob Gaulke's 2nd book (after The Nervous Tourist) is his personal adventure into the world of teaching English in Japan. Told in diary-like entries, this is an entertaining and illuminating look into the world of teaching. This beautiful paperback release features a cover by Pete McCracken.
Bob Gaulke lives and teaches now in the Bronx.

"This addictive book kept me from doing anything else--work, laundry, speaking to my family--until I'd finished it. With a laugh on every page, Gaulke's direct, disarming style captures the funny, strange, and muted lunacy of Japan in a way that few other writers manage." --Chuck Thompson, author of Smile When You're Lying

"Well-observed and frequently hilarious." --Rolf Potts, author of Marco Polo Didn't Go There








Our Beloved 26th
By Riley Michael Parker

$3.00 (plus $1 shipping), 40 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-33-3
ISBN-10: 1-892061-33-1
Riley Michael Parker has created a perverse, white collar world full of angry and oversexed office drones. Our Beloved 26th is a biting satire and an assured debut by a bold new Portland antihero. A specially-priced pocket-size chapbook with cover art by the author.

Read an interview with Riley.


Double Header is a "flipbook" featuring two of Suzanne's stories. These are the two cover images for those stories. Art by Kurt Eisenlohr. Double Header
By Suzanne Burns

$5.00, 44 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-32-4
ISBN-10: 1-892061-32-5

Suzanne Burns shows us that size does matter, but not in the way we think. Using size both literally and as a metaphor, Tiny Ron raises questions about every fairy tale that ends with marriage, and every marriage clouded with myth.--Monica Drake

Suzanne Burns is obsessed with misfits. An Acquired Taste is a love story about a widowed street magician and a glass-eating divorcee. But Burns never treats her characters as one-dimensional freaks. She offers us a look past their exteriors, into their hearts and minds, where, ultimately, we find ourselves.--Elizabeth Ellen

Read an interview with Suzanne.


Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella
By Myriam Gurba

$14.00, 224 pages
ISBN-13: 9781933149165
ISBN-10: 1933149167

WINNER of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction!

Buy the e-book!

Chicana. Goth. Dykling. Desiree Garcia knows she's weird and a weirdo magnet. To extinguish her strangeness, her parents ship her to Saint Michael's Catholic High School, then to Mexico, but neurology can't be snuffed out so easily: Screwy brain chemistry holds the key to Desiree's madness. As fellow crazies sense a kinship with her, Desiree attracts a coterie of both wanted and unwanted admirers, including a pair of racist deathrock sisters, a pretty Hispanic girl who did time in California's most infamous mental asylum, and a transnational stalker with a pronounced limp.
As high school graduation nears, Desiree's weirdness turns from charming to alarming. Plagued by increasingly bizarre thoughts and urges, Desiree convinces herself she's schizophrenic, despite assurance otherwise. In college, she finds Rae, an ex-carnie trannyboi, who becomes the June Carter to her Johnny Cash. With Rae's help, Desiree answers the riddle of her insanity and names her disease.
Combining the spark of Michelle Tea, the comic angst of Augusten Burroughs, and the warmth of Sandra Cisneros, Mexican American author Myriam Gurba has created a territory all her own. Dahlia Season not only contains the title novella, but also several of Gurba's acclaimed stories.

Read an Interview




Before You She Was a Pit Bull
By Elizabeth Ellen

$5 (plus $1 for shipping), 52 pages
ISBN-10: 1-892061-30-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-30-0

Elizabeth Ellen is one of the most thrilling writers to come out of the literary Internet scene. She writes boldly about her wayward characters--reckless women, cold-shouldered men, and unsupervised children. In her debut collection, Before You She Was a Pit Bull, Ellen unleashes six stories that will crush your heart and leave you begging for more.

Elizabeth Ellen's eye never fails to capture the most revealing  details in these humane, off-kilter fictions.  Like Denis Johnson, her stories take place in the passenger seats and rec rooms of an uneasy Americana and are warmed by a generous sensitivity to human frailty.

--Ryan Boudinot, author of The Littlest Hitler


Read an Interview



Don’t Take Your Life
By Justin Maurer

$5 (plus $1 for shipping), 48 pages
ISBN 1-892061-29-5

Don't Take Your Life is the first book of true stories by Portland, Oregon musician and rabble rouser, Justin Maurer.  These gritty and lucid memoirs burn brightly on the page as Justin presents his eccentric father, his deaf mother, his freewheeling siblings, and a vibrant cast of co-stars. Divided into two parts, the book shifts from resonant childhood dramas to Justin’s adventures as a wide-eyed traveler. Highlights include Justin’s father explaining sex, Justin huffing gasoline as a teenager, a botched attempt at losing his virginity, pining for a Canadian beauty, getting drugged in Istanbul, and passing out in a black lesbian club in Manhattan.

Justin Maurer is as charmed as he is charming. Don’t Take Your Life is about walking into any worldwide situation without fear or guile. From being homeless in a van to getting drugged in a Turkish rug shop, you’re always rooting for Justin to come out on top. – Todd Taylor, author of Born to Rock and Shirley Wins


Read an Interview




Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter
By Eric Spitznagel

trade paperback, 224 pp.
US$13.95
ISBN-10: 1-933149-05-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-933149-05-9
Part of the Future Tense series published by Manic D Press

Buy the e-book!

With dreams of becoming a highly respected screenwriter, Eric Spitznagel moves to LA. When Hollywood fails to notice him, he settles for the next best thing: writing scripts for adult films. Determined to make the most of his bad luck, he sets out to make a movie that will be celebrated more for its witty dialogue and gripping plot than its raw depictions of hardcore sex. As Spitznagel discovers, making the Great American Porn is far from easy, especially when you've been hired to write a sequel to Butt Crazy.

"Like most pornography, I found Fast Forward to be a relentless and indecent assault on the traditional family values that Americans find most sacred. Makes a great stocking stuffer." - Amy Sedaris

Read an Interview

The Heart Is Also a Furnace
By Magdalen Powers
ISBN 1-892061-28-7
$5, 44 pages 

The strange, elusive, and haunting stories in Magdalen Powers’s long-awaited second collection are like stars—small, sparkling, and, upon closer inspection, containing worlds full of shadows and surprises. The Heart is Also a Furnace contains 26 stories about bizarre dreams, serene desires, and cracked innocence in language that is carefully concise, slyly humorous, and always artful.
Read an interview with Magdalen.




Grope: A Fiction
By Dayvid Figler
ISBN 1-892061-25-2
$4, 36 page chapbook

What happens when a wandering Jew and his long-time friend meet at a strip club on Thanksgiving?

Award-winning NPR commentator and performer Dayvid Figler's Grope is the story of Finn, a man who has let a lifetime of decadent Las Vegas culture catch up to him. His friend Harvey meets him at the Original Eden Gentlemen's Club, forgoing a holiday with their families for a night of drinking and lap dances. There they meet Beth (dancer name: Cookie), someone that shares Finn's loneliness and hope for renewal. Dayvid Figler's story about one night in Vegas comically dances on that fine line between sexual perversity and spiritual pilgrimage.


Read an Interview


The Insomniac Reader
edited by Kevin Sampsell
ISBN 0-916397-94-7
Trade Paper, $13.95,
264 pages

People are different at night. More desperate, violent, or sad. Sometimes
hunting for adventure, sex, drugs. Cruising around, throwing their bodies
recklessly into...anything. The stories in The Insomniac Reader: Stories
of the Night examine the dark side (literally and figuratively) of the
evening time. From prostitution and adultery to emergency rooms and
suicide. This anthology features some of the best writers in the country
(Jonathan Ames, Rick Moody, Aimee Bender, Michelle Tea, James Tate,
Jonathan Lethem, and many others) shining their flashlights into a world
that begins around the time when most people are asleep. Click on cover
to see a list of stories and contributors.

Note: The Insomniac Reader is the first release in the Future Tense
series, being generously published through Manic D Press, the great small
press in San Francisco. Future titles in the series will be
distributed widely by Publishers Group West. We're very excited about this
new venture, which should happen about once a year. You can also order
these books from the Manic D web site or your favorite bookstore.




Strategies for Modern Living
By Charles Ullmann
ISBN 1-892061-24-4
$4,
40 pages

Charles Ullmann has emerged as a one-man fiction and satire wrecking ball, an expatriate looking in from the outside, a mad scientist who shapes words and sentences into stories that are odd, funny, shocking, and new. A young writer who has emerged from the on-line world of letters, his writing is like a cross between Robert Coover and Richard Brautigan, with an acerbic touch that’s not afraid to poke you in the gut from time to time.


Read a bonus interview here





The Nervous Tourist
By Bob Gaulke
ISBN 1-892061-22-8
$5, 56 pages

Bob Gaulke moved to Salvador, Brazil from Portland, Oregon in the winter of 2001in a cultural experiment designed to measure the effects of a musical, tropical culture on the body of a cynically nervous 34 year old North American male. He faithfully reported his findings in a series of email essays and interviews in the year that followed, covering interactions with street vendors, dancers, musicians, beach goers, and random members of the Bahian (residents of Salvador) middle class. Confined to roaming the tourist neighborhoods that line the four-lane beach front thoroughfare (The 'Orla') of the city of Salvador, Gaulke attempted to shed as much of his preconceptions and inhibitions as he could during a 12 month period. The Nervous Tourist is the hilarious result.



Happy Ending: Selected Writing
by Mike Topp
ISBN 1-892061-18-x
$5, 56 pages

Mike Topp has been a longtime favorite in the world of adventurous literary magazines and web sites. His short work blurs the lines of poetry, fiction, memoir, and disjointed logic. This 52-page mini-book includes some of Topp's best-loved work.

Mike Topp's other chapbook, Own Your Own can be bought here!

 


Playthings
By Karl Koweski

ISBN 1-892061-14-7
$4.95, 44 pages

Playthings is the debut collection of stories by Alabama writer Karl
Koweski. Well-known in the world of "small magazines", Koweski has stormed
the scene with numerous appearances in journals and zines the past couple
of years.


 St*rf*ck*ng
short stories
by Jemiah Jefferson

ISBN 1-892061-09-0 Fiction $4 US, 40 pages

The short stories of Jemiah Jefferson take on the sensual and emotional perplexities of the celebrity life. It doesn't matter if you're talking about the famous people of Portland, Oregon or Hollywood. They all feel the pressure of living up to their image, while also trying to figure out how to act in the public eye.



 Freels Comes Alive!
short fictions by Brandon Freels ISBN 1-892061-12-0
$3.95, 40 pages

Freels Comes Alive! marks the return of one of America's small press enigmas, Brandon Freels. His writing--abstract, painfully self-conscious, alarmingly funny, and ambitious in form--seems to inhabit a planet where things continually morph and change unannounced.




 Girl Juice
stories by Ritah Parrish
ISBN 1-892061-11-2, 44 pages, $5.00

Ritah Parrish serves up more dark, evil goodies in her second fiction collection.



 Invisible Radios
Here's a strange soup of kink, humor and slander for ya! As John Clark, editor for the great Indiana litzine pLopLop says: "If Andy Kaufman devoted his life to poetry instead of comedy, the result would closely resemble the twists and surprises of Kevin Sampsell's writing... Sampsell's work transcends categories, labels & movements. Plus there's always the delight in wondering "What'll he come up with next time?" and Two Girls Review's Lidia Yuknavitch calls it "Blasted open" and says Sampsell "forms and deform poetry." See what everyone is talking about in the pornographic stores- Buy this book!
Kevin Sampsell

ISBN 1-892061-05-8, 40 pages
$4.00


The Patricia Letters by Kevin Sampsell
A collection of fictional letters from an 80-year old Oklahoma man to his future step-daughter. Full of southern humor and wisdom. Now in its 2nd printing! "The Patricia Letters is a mind theater of a true American voice-sincere, subtle, taut, a rarity in the smaller presses these days." --Michael Hemmingson, author of *The Naughty Yard* 36 pages, $4


Let's Start Something Special


by Kevin Sampsell

From 1995, Kevin's frank foray into the world of "post-punk pornography". 18 and older please. 30 pages SOLD OUT


Holes: a book not entirely about golf
by Richard Meltzer


ISBN 1-892061-02-3, 40 pages
$4.00

This new release by the author of *The Night (Alone)* and *The Aesthetics of Rock* is a lovely collector's chapbook featuring "What is This Thing Called Golf", an essay on the author, a hilarious on-the-field battles with trying to understand this famous leisure sport. Also added are several new poems in a section called *Savage Meat*. This legendary icon is known for creating the gonzo art of rock journalism back in the 60's and Tom Robbins has called Meltzer " A firecracker under the teacup of polite fiction."Grammar, puncuation, and English purists may want to drink some hard liquor before this one!

 



Pink Menace

Ritah Parrish

ISBN 0-9653194-9-0, 44 pages
$4.00

The stories in this collection have been called "deliciously creepy" by Beth Lisick, but they are also funny, vivid, and true. An audience favorite of Portland audiences since storming the scene in '95, these tales display a dark new direction. *Monkey Girl* author Beth Lisick says, "Though Ritah Parrish has already cut a juicy swath acros the nation's performance poetry scene, this first collection of stories reveals the other dimension behind her dead-on, cringeworthy insights... A deliciously creepy foray into the lives of people you stand behind at the supermarket and wonder about."

 



Woman Who Hears voices
Veteran Portland poet unleashes a storm of words about cracking, breaking, and putting back together again. A book that takes you out of your own body into other's experiences. Doug Marx of *The Oregonian* says Orr has a "tough-minded, sometimes scathingly funny way of moving through her material", while James Fleming comments, "These poems weave in and out of the madhouse."

 

 

Verlena Orr

ISBN 0-9653194-9-0
$3.00


Savoir County
Deceptively simple flash fictions that subvert your mind into thinking its reading a newspaper from Twin Peaks or some other Lynchian place! A cruel pleasure. Even *Factsheet 5* found themselves surprised at the odd power of this collection- "He packs so much action into each paragraph that it comes off with a disturbing surreal edge. The perfect thing for reading on the bus or for on top of the toilet(!) Surprisingly enjoyable." also available: *Razor Burns* (more white trash stories)- $2

Stephen Kurowski


ISBN 0-9653194-6-6
$3.00

 



Jesus Christ: Live and In The Flesh by Lyn Lifshin


Perhaps the strangest and funniest book ever released by the "Queen of the small presses". Lyn has a personal relationship with Jesus that you won't believe! "One of those unbelievably vivid reads where the images just appear automatically and can't be shaken for days afterward. Not that you'd want them to disappear either." --*Bleeding Velvet Octopus* $4


Museum Quality Orgasm
by Carl Miller Daniels
$5

Huge collection of full-on gay porno poems. Funny, agitated, and horny as hell! Includes many references to mutual-masturbation and lean lithe athletic boys. A must have. "Whimsical, angst-ridden, and horny as hell. This collection is a joy to read, a must have." --*L

 


ISBN 0-9653194-9-X


The Diner Anthology
This best-selling (well, in small press terms anyway) booklet is chopped into four sections for your convenience and dining pleasure. Highlighting the quirky and surreal world of eating and drinking out are: John M. Bennett, Alan Catlin, Duncan Zenobia Saffir, Dayvid Figler, Jeff Meyers, Mike Halchin, Andre Ricciardi, Richard Meltzer, Mary Winter, Lydia Eugene, Oberc, Golda Fried, and many more. $4.00


***The Following Books Are Out of Print***




The Haiku Inferno Book
By Haiku Inferno (Frank D'Andrea, Elizabeth Miller, Frayn Masters, and Kevin Sampsell)

SOLD OUT (May be reprinted soon), 32 pages
The long-awaited first collection by the Portland haiku performance group. Mixes the absurdity, anger, and humor of their work into a greatest hits stew. Lovingly printed, designed, bound, and published by Crack Press of Portland. Limited to 200 copies.



Black Fag
Shane Allison
ISBN 1-892061-23-6
SOLD OUT, 24 pages


Shane Allison is a star that continues to rise in the world of provocative queer writing. This special fold-out book has 13 poems in 24 pages, with titles like Slut Machine, I’m His Nigger, and Talking Dirty to Myself. Deeply personal, abrasive, funny, and shocking, the poems seem to melt together, making Black Fag one of the most enthralling books of poetry that you’re likely to read in this day and age.


Grosse Pointe Girl
By by Sarah Grace McCandless

ISBN 1-89206-110-4 OUT OF PRINT
The second book of the Heavy Flow series, McCandless offers an intriguing look at one of the country's richest suburbs, and growing up therein. This book was picked up by Simon & Schuster. Buy that version here. Congrats, Sarah!


Meat Won't Pay My Light Bill a novel
by Kurt Eisenlohr

ISBN 1-892061-08-2 Fiction OUT OF PRINT
Meet Lupus Totten. A young midwestern man with two dead end jobs to support his bar binges and floundering art. He's convinced that only one thing can help him straighten out his life: winning back the love of his life. This book was re-published by Rose City Publishers in 2008.


Please Don't Kill the Freshman
by Zoe Trope

SOLD OUT
ISBN: 1-892061-13-9
Please Don't Kill the Freshman is the true tale of one Portland girl's first year of high school. It signals the emergence of a true and totally original voice in the world of underground writing.
This title was bought by Harper Tempest and a longer version of the book is available through them.


You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?
by Susannah Breslin

ISBN 1-892061-19-8 Fiction SOLD OUT
Postfeminist psuedo-sexpert Susannah Breslin's poignantly provocative short stories of mannequin fetishism, midget love, and pornographers gone wild provide the perfect literary accompaniment to the porn collection of any true intellectual. Bringing together the hilariously obscene and the obscenely hilarious, You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? heralds the long-awaited arrival of PornoPomoLit, a.k.a. Pornographic Postmodern Literature. Until now, fondling a book never felt so right.
She is literature's dominatrix, with a heart where her whip should be. –Richard
Rushfield


A Common Pornography Limited Edition 2003 Version
by Kevin Sampsell

ISBN 1-892061-15-5, 60 pages, SOLD OUT
A Common Pornography explores the fragmented world of youthful memories in a style at once spare, haunting, and uncomfortably nostalgic. Kevin Sampsell's daring and creative style of memoir is peppered with insightful (perhaps distracting) footnotes by Mike Daily and ethereal photo-collages by Melody Owen to create a literary montage unlike anything of recent memory. A beautifully designed trade paperback. 60 pages. The new expanded edition of this book was released in January 2010 from Harper Perennial. Buy it here!


LungMouth
by Frank D'Andrea

ISBN 1-892061-01-5
SOLD OUT
LungMouth is a poetic suite of stories, distractions, sound effects and thoughts. Presented in a bite-size package that will keep you full for days, LungMouth is a document that shows us how language can be loved, fondled, and thrown about recklessly. Sounds inhuman and words deeply felt are juxtaposed until they seem to break and crumble with fantastic force. Frank is also a member of Haiku Inferno.


Doll Head Eater
by Gregory Tozian

ISBN 0-9653194-8-2, SOLD OUT
Full throttle and full length, Baby! High octane, high quality, high times. Called "A revelation" by Philip K. Dick award winner Rudy Rucker. Super stylin' at 128 pages. *Factsheet 5* recently said: "Think of middle America spinning fast and out of control. Think of a Raymond Carver story immersed in alien radioactive ooze. Think of a trailer park *Fahrenheit 451* or George Orwell on acid... You just don't know what you're going to get on your plate in Doll Head Eater". A fantastic, sometimes surreal read!


Who The Hell is Brandon Freels?
by Brandon Freels

ISBN 1-892061-01-5
SOLD OUT
As quick and as blinding as lightning, these fictions go POP! in the brain. Awesome color cover plus an Introduction by Hal Sirowitz (just so you know it's strange). "If the names Donald Barthelme and Firesign Theater mean anything to you, perhaps you'll find a message in the humor and absurdity of Freels... he's not quadrophenic, he's octaphenic." --*Flipside* $3


paper or plastic
by Michael Walsh


Subliminal piano noise or a dyslexic diary? Just when you thought originality was dead. Intro by Richard Meltzer. "Not that old Gen-X whine, not abuse hotline, neither PC nor PI but that voice, laconic but more robust than it first seemed. Beckett in a better mood than you've ever heard." --Douglas Spangle, author of *Initial* $3 Also by Michael Walsh: *the sound eye full* and *bruising my every*